[song]

I'm very glad for that thread. I didn't know that I also needed to uncheck "Include Spotlight Suggestions" in Safari additionally to Preferences.

I do not understand why there's such a backlash against anyone that points out that:

1. It's not intuitive to have to both disable "Include Spotlight Suggestions" in Safari and in Preferences.

2. People like my father who are privacy conscious but are average computer users would not think to look for this in Spotlight and Search and instead would look in the privacy tab instead

3. Apple released and advertises cool privacy features like MAC address randomization that actually do not work. It only works with Location Services and 3G disabled according to the reports which is never going to happen. This makes me feel that the new focus on privacy from Apple is more for PR purpose than something they really care for.

That said, I like Apple products, I've been using macs since 2004 and I would have a hard time going back to using Linux (still have nightmares about all the work needed to support my laptop correctly) but that doesn't mean I'm giving them a pass on those privacy issues.

I know a lot of people here feel that all of this is much ado about nothing but really, it's clearly not obvious and if I hadn't read yesterday's thread I wouldn't have been aware that Safari sends my search to Apple even if selected Duck Duck Go and disabled Spotlight Suggestions in preferences.

[rsynnott]

> This makes me feel that the new focus on privacy from Apple is more for PR purpose than something they really care for.

It may well be something that some parts of the organisation care about, but clearly it is not something that the UX people designing the settings applets care about (assuming such people exist; for a company generally very good at UI and UX, Apple tends to have very confusing settings stuff).

[simonh]

>This makes me feel that the new focus on privacy from Apple is more for PR purpose than something they really care for.

Clearly they are doing it for their own purposes, and your post is fair comment, but if their interests and their customer's interests align then that's good for both sides.

It's also possible that while their current privacy oriented features leave gaps that are exploitable, that's just because the remaining gaps are trickier to address and will just take longer. Also just because elements of the communications infrastructure they don't control may be open, that doesn't mean they should therefore leave the elements of it they do control open as well. It certainly doesn't mean that them locking down those elemts is somehow necessarily a cynical move. That's not the sort of attitude I think we should be taking as it explicitly penalises and discourages individuals and companies from even trying to improve things.

[song]

I agree with you but in the case of the MAC address randomization, the fact that they don't work according to reports when location services or cellular data is turned on seems more like a bug due to insufficient QA. I really can't see any technical reasons why MAC address randomization would be disabled if location services or cellular data is enabled.

I'm happy that they try to talk about privacy but for now I give them some flak because they're advertising this feature which actually never works for normal users (who turns off their cellular data before closing their phone?).

For my points #1 and #2, I think it's mostly an oversight in term of UI design but again Apple is well known for it's attention to details in UI design and this feels half baked like if they didn't spend time thinking about privacy implications and the way users actually behave. My disappointment is because I expected better from Apple, they usually are very good at clear UI design and thinking through things like this.

I hope I'm proven wrong and that Apple really delivers on its promises when it comes to privacy but right now, there's still some way to go beyond the speeches and ads that have been made.

[deadweight4]

The text when you open spotlight explains that it's looking on the internet. The first icon is safari. Every search you do, including siri, kortana, and ok google sends information to the respective company. Apparently bendgate didn't satisfy the fans, so they had to come up with a tortured reason to be all upset. I really tire of this horse shit, and would expect better.

[song]

I disabled spotlight suggestions in the preferences but didn't in Safari (since it never came into my mind that I'd need to disable it there too).

When I searched on safari, I didn't see spotlight suggestions but I can confirm that it phoned home.

I don't get why people get so defensive when it's just a simple fact. Even someone technically minded like me who actually disabled Spotlight suggestions in Preferences because I didn't want to send information to Apple, ended up sending information when searching on Safari. This is an issue.

[arrrg]

Why would you expect Safari to not communicate with the web? I'm mystified by this attitude.

[song]

I expect Safari to communicate with the web, I just don't expect it to send my search data to apple's server when I selected Duck Duck Go as a search engine and when I disabled Spotlight suggestion in the preferences. Having to disable "Spotlight suggestion" a second time in Safari's preferences is the issue and is what I blame Apple.

[arrrg]

That makes no sense to me to be honest. I really don’t understand this attitude, even on a basic level.

[scintill76]

Would you be bothered if full video of your browser window was constantly streamed to Apple by default, with no ability to erase footage? If not, I don't know what to say. But if so, being told "It's just communicating with the web, what'd you expect from a browser?" wouldn't help, would it?

Obviously this is the extreme, and I'm not likening sending search queries to fulltime video surveillance, but the point is people have different thresholds of what they will tolerate. Apparently most HN users' tolerance is high, or at least they are willing to defend Apple on this for whatever reasons. Some of ours is low, so that's why we are complaining.

[sp332]

When I do a search on my local computer, say for a file or some email, there's no reason that data should go to Apple.