{"id":3813,"date":"2014-10-21T05:41:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T21:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/?p=3813"},"modified":"2015-09-09T19:36:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T11:36:44","slug":"apples-os-x-yosemite-spotlight-privacy-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/2014\/10\/apples-os-x-yosemite-spotlight-privacy-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple’s OS X Yosemite Spotlight Privacy Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Apple<\/a> pushed out it’s latest and great OS X version 10.10 called Yosemite, but it’s facing a bit of an uproar at the moment about some Spotlight privacy issues. For those who are not familiar, Spotlight is some kinda of super desktop search that searches everything on your computer (and now also the Internet) – which is not cool as every search means your physical location & search term is sent to Apple (and 3rd parties like Microsoft) every time you use Spotlight.<\/p>\n

\"OS<\/p>\n

The upside? Yosemite is pretty cool and also security wise it comes with patches for both POODLE<\/a> and Shellshock<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even so, Apple should know better than this and respect privacy by default as they surely understand how something like can blow up.<\/p>\n

There’s growing disquiet over Apple’s desktop search app Spotlight, which sends queries for things back to the company’s servers to process.<\/p>\n

Spotlight phones home in OS X Yosemite, version 10.10, and it is enabled by default: it can be switched off, but with Apple insisting that it now takes people’s privacy seriously, the software has raised some eyebrows. It appears Spotlight sends queries, along with your location, back to Apple over the internet so the company can suggest related things from the web using Microsoft’s Bing engine. Apple says it needs to see your queries so it can improve Spotlight’s algorithms for suggesting things.<\/p>\n

So, for example, searching for “weather” on a Register Mac running OS X 10.10 reveals files, folders and installed applications (such as the Windows 8.1 weather app in Parallels) on the machine containing the keyword; that’s the local search part. This is what you’d expect to see.<\/p>\n

But then Spotlight contacts Apple remotely to get recommended software from the Apple App Store, and a search by Bing for any relevant websites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n