am i the only one wondering what MENU_OTHER is?
It's for unknown filetypes that are matched by your search query which don't fall under any of the other categories.
Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
41–50 of 137 posts
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#42It's missing a default value for "DEVELOPER" (whatever that is)
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#43Feels like Apple is the new Sony. No more MBPs for me.
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#44There is a war on going in search. You can see it in Google's quarterly results where this last quarter they spent nearly a billion dollars on paid distribution (aka people they pay to send them searches that they can monetize rather than people who just show up at Google.com or one of their properties). It stuns me that Apple hasn't bitten the bullet and built a search engine yet since they could make more on it tha…
Based on Apple's past history, they do not want to sell your personal data. That's Google's modus operandi, and common for other companies too, but Apple has demonstrated time and time again that they are focused on the user.
To that end, there's 2 things going on here:
1. Apple added functionality called Spotlight Suggestions, which pulls in data from the internet, including things like iTunes and App Store results, wikipedia results, movie showtimes, etc. It's basically a form of the specialized search results you get in search engines (such as Google, Bing, and, yes, even DuckDuckGo) where it tries to extract semantic meaning from your query and give you the result inline. This is generally considered very useful for search engines, and Apple decided they wanted Spotlight to have this behavior.
I think this makes sense. Spotlight is basically Sherlock 2.0, so this finally restores behavior that Sherlock (and Watson before it) had (although Sherlock/Watson required you to explicitly search the various providers, whereas Spotlight decides when to do the searches based on its own interpretation of the query).
The privacy implication here is that searches used with Spotlight Suggestions are sent to Apple, so they can improve Spotlight Suggestions. This is something that web search engines already have, and is important for making the functionality behave better. This data is not shared with anyone else, sold, or monetized. And yes, I believe Apple when they say that.
Also to note, this is basically exactly what already happens with Siri. Your Siri queries are sent to Apple (so they can actually be answered), and that information is used to make Siri better.
2. The second part of this is Bing Web Searches. It appears most queries don't even go to Bing. I tried a random sampling of queries and never saw any search results. The Privacy button states that "Searches for common words and phrases will be forwarded from Apple to Microsoft's Bing search engine", which makes it sound like Bing only even sees the search if Spotlight determines that it can't handle this query with local data or Spotlight Suggestions.
Which is to say, this does not mean that Microsoft sees every search you do. It seems they only see some searches, which are for "common words and phrases". Also, according to this, "These searches are not stored by Microsoft", which suggests that Apple's contract with Microsoft puts restrictions on them regarding how they can use the search.
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Ultimately, Apple only cares about what makes the user experience better. They're in the hardware business. That's where their money comes from. And they're successful precisely because whenever they're given the choice between something that might make more money, vs something that makes the user experience better, they choose the latter every single time. And monetizing searches does not make the user experience better.
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#45Breaking news: searching on Google sends your query to a third-party server! FILM AT 11!
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Location services? Edit: I think that you have to disable Location service for Spotlight separately in Privacy settings.
Good thought, but I disabled that too. Edit: Twitter discussion regarding one of these issues. Note that Spotlight is doing this despite all relevant settings disabled (spotlight suggestions, bing, privacy, and logging). https://twitter.com/marczak/status/481818945318428673
wu.apple.com is an address associated with location service requests. If you've disabled location for spotlight, it's possible that it was something else requesting the location.
No idea about that smoot thing, though.
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#47I applaud them for publicizing the implications of the default privacy settings for Spotlight, but hyperbolic titles like the one used here hurt their credibility unnecessarily.
I know some people think that using hyperbole for effect is a thing. They tend to be very young, smart people who are starting to realize what they're capable of but are still trapped on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger curve. The most common defense people give is that they assume the reader or listener knows that the hyperbole shouldn't be taken literally, and that they're really trying to convey how strongly they feel about their much more reasonable actual opinion on the matter.
However, to me (and, I would hope, to most people), hyperbole in technical discussions means that the person is either immature in a way that makes them less credible, or that they are lying to me and assume I'm dumb enough to believe them. Or it's clickbait, or all of the above.
I don't think the author(s) of this site are any of those things, but I also know that Yosemite as a whole is not designed to take away 100% of your privacy, which is what the title implies. This is also what turns me off about a lot of FSF propaganda, and most politicians regardless of their beliefs.
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#48This reminds me that I should really get around to figuring out how to disable spotlight altogether. It can occasionally peg my CPU.
mdutil -a -i off
Or, 'man mdutil' if you would rather not type in commands suggested by random people on the Internet. :)
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#49For those interested, here's the specific language Apple offers to explain what Spotlight is doing. I didn't see it elsewhere so I figured I'd post it. From the Spotlight preferences pane: "When you use Spotlight, your search queries, the Spotlight Suggestions you select, and related usage data will be sent to Apple. Search results found on your Mac will not be sent. If you have Location Services on your Mac turned o…
Could this be considered overthinking it? A domain, a python script, to effectively achieve tapping a couple toggles in sys prefs? And this is quite difficult for the average non terminal using person. > This site _criticizes_ Apple for certain privacy-invading features of Mac OS X and teaches users how to fix them. So, obviously, the site is not approved by Apple. Snark!
Howdy. Author here. By way of introduction, I'm also the author of PLCrashReporter (https://www.plcrashreporter.org/), ported Java 6 to Mac OS X (a.k.a Soylatte), and -- this might lower some folk's estimation of me here -- started the MacPorts project almost 15 years ago at Apple, along with co-workers Jordan Hubbard and Kevin Van Vechten.
That slightly snarky disclaimer you quoted actually has a serious backstory; the language came from https://fixubuntu.com (whose AGPL code was used here), and it was added after Ubuntu sent a legal demand that "Ubuntu" be removed from the fixubuntu domain name and website:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canoni...
I actually toned down the snark -- just slightly -- from the original disclaimer.
It's remarkably easy to miss Spotlight's privacy disclosure in Yosemite -- the instant you start typing in the Spotlight search box, the disclosure disappears, and seemingly stays gone. There's no single "local search only" toggle, and you have to cross-reference the documentation provided in System Preferences against the list of "Search Results" to figure out which of the options actually sends your queries to Apple.
I wanted something simple, that I knew worked, and I could just tell family to run themselves, so I put this together. It's a convenient way to apply the settings, a jumping-off point for a more involved effort to resolve some of the other remaining privacy issues on Yosemite, and a handy way to get the privacy message across.
If you're interested in chipping in on the OS X privacy front, there's a lot more to look at than just Spotlight; my next goal is to get https://github.com/fix-macosx/sslsplit transparently capturing traffic in a Yosemite VM so that we can start nailing down exactly what is being sent from the myriad of daemons (and spotlight!) that are sending data outwards in a default configuration.
I'm very sympathetic to the "random internet code" issue, so I struck a balance by:
1) Displaying the source inline in the page (of course, there's no guarantee that it matches the downloaded code, but the goal here is to highlight the important of knowing what you're running).
2) Making the actual script URL a clickable link, so that folks that don't blindly execute curl scripts (myself included) can easily download the script and examine it.
3) Used a variation of the usual pipe approach (curl -O … && ./…) so that anyone downloading it would actually have a copy of what they just ran.
4) Serve the whole lot over TLS.
Cheers, Landon
Re: Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple
#50I strongly encourage anyone concerned about their privacy to start using a firewall that filters (or at least monitors) outbound traffic by default. And not just the packets, but the web requests. You would very likely be alarmed by what your phone is doing and who it's talking to without you knowing. iPhone or Android.
Recommended tools? I've gotten by for a while on Little Snitch. Good enough for a single user on a home network?