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Funny - just compare how Ubuntu was bashed for Amazon lens in Unity and how differently Apple is treated for the same (or even worse) things here on HN
If you enter your email as @apple.com, it returns back:
apple.com
mail.apple.com
993
IMAP
MACOSX
PLAIN
edit: all right, jokes aside, the title is horrible and unparseable for many reasons:
"Yosemite" without stating it's OS X Yosemite throws you off with the first word. It "Sends Spotlight" (comma). All right, sends spotlight what? Is sends a verb, why is it capitalized? Let's move on... "Safari Searches", Safari searches what? Again with the random capitalization of searches? Or I guess it was a verb and "Spotlight, Safari" is a list. The fact that both are also common words doesn't help - it would be more obvious that we are talking about products/brands if "searches" and "sends" weren't capitalized. Continue... "to Apple" - yeah, this makes sense (first time in this sentence). Even "to" is not capitalized (but it makes you question your decision about sends/searches). Comma. Third parties. What?!
Seriously, it's awful.
Original discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8479958
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can't have that and not share your searches with Apple Why on earth not? Why can't the search box just talk to DDG?
Isn't what people are getting hot and bothered about is that " local " searches are sending data out on the internet, rather than where they happen to be sending it?
As a HN user, I'm in that category of people. However, I was surprised, when using my phone that I expected Spotlight to search both locally and online. The difference is that I never use spotlight on my mobile, I just don't have that much stuff to look locally, so I had fresh user expectation: "cool I can make search anywhere", so when spotlight did not do it was a bit of a let down and since then I have never used Spotlight on IOS again, I just open the browser.
Not saying that Apple is right or anything, but the reasoning may simply be "if I have a global search button not looking online by default, will regular user not think of that as a bug"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one might be more relevant: "Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8473580 Hint: you have to uncheck two checkboxes that OS X explicitly tells you about in the very same Spotlight preferences, plus another one in Location preferences.
The spotlight preferences are not explicit. I would never have opened them without reading this news item first. However, I can understand the philosophy of searching the wen and the desktop in parallel. Ubuntu does the same (they search Amazon, not sure if also the web in general), and they also got a lot of flak for it.
If one would never even open Spotlight preferences, then yeah, it is not possible to see, enable or disable those preferences. But then one should also not complain that it is impossible to enable or disable these preferences. By that logic, every application that does anything with any privacy implications should have it's primary interface littered with preference toggles to make it completely obvious how it's functionality can be altered.
I recently replaced Spotlight with Alfred and realized how much I was missing out. It's surprisingly faster and cleaner. I would really suggest it to anyone who haven't tried it yet.
Have you compared Alfred with Spotlight in Yosemite?
Alfred feels like it was very much an "inspiration" for the new Spotlight but as is often the way with little helper type apps, if it's good enough, sooner or later it will get rolled into the OS.
The business model Joel Spolsky referred to as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller.
Original discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8479958
This one might be more relevant: "Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8473580 Hint: you have to uncheck two checkboxes that OS X explicitly tells you about in the very same Spotlight preferences, plus another one in Location preferences.
That Mail one is probably the least alarming, and I would assume that Outlook does the same thing. When you first set up a mail account, it sends your email domain to https://mac-services.apple.com/iconfig/dconf and, provided Apple has a match for it, it will return auto-configure POP/IMAP/SMTP settings. If you enter your email as @apple.com, it returns back: apple.com mail.apple.com 993 IMAP MACOSX PLAIN
Am I missing something here? The web search / autocomplete functionality contacts some servers.. You can disable them. Mail client tries to fetch known IMAP / SMTP info for a given domain to ease setup. Are there some weird data being sent? Honestly, I might have missed some concerning communication but as far as I can tell, this is just for the sake of added functionality and can be disabled. Expecting OS level stuf…
No, the difference is that people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category.