What does HackerNews think of yosemite-phone-home?

Apple absolutely is horrible for privacy. To insist otherwise suggests you might either be uninformed, willfully ignorant, falling victim to Apple's sham marketing around privacy, experiencing stockholm syndrome, or an apple employee.

Examples include: - Apple surreptitiously recording conversations without user consent (https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Public-St...) - Apple approving apps in the app store that have libraries ostensibly singly focused on the violation of privacy, complete with behavior that would be expected from those with suspicious or questionable motives, like uploading in the middle of the night (https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2019/05/its-3-am-do-you-k...) - Misleading users into thinking that their wifi and bluetooth may be disabled when they actually aren't - a UI control that merely disconnects the radios from APs / remote devices, rather than turning the radios off (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/21/ios-11-ap...) - iPhones send a ton of data (including call logs) to Apple servers, which participated in the illegal PRISM mass surveillance scandal, and conceivably report to similar secret programs that the public is not aware of to this day (https://theintercept.com/2016/11/17/iphones-secretly-send-ca...) - iMessage reports back to Apple every phone number you've ever entered into it, data that Apple probably shares with law enforcement (https://theintercept.com/2016/09/28/apple-logs-your-imessage...) - iCloud is enabled by default. All of your pictures, videos, documents, etc are NSA-accessible, but also rendered vulnerable to anyone with your credentials. This was the root cause of the celebrity nude photo leaks several years ago. - Mac computers had routinely sent files stored on encrypted disks to Apple servers without user permission ever being prompted for or granted (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/04/apple-dat...) - Here's a great analysis of all the snooping Apple did on Yosemite with all privacy features enabled (https://github.com/fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home) - More various articles (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/05/new-guidelines-outli...), (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/23/iphone-ba...), (https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/privacy-advocat...).

And these are just privacy concerns. This doesn't even begin to delve into the realms of DRM, downgrade prevention, planned obsolescence, dark patterns, censorship, or open collaboration with inhumane, authoritarian regimes.

> without asking permission.

> Apple admits the spying in a search facility, but there's a lot more snooping that Apple has not talked about.

> Various operations in the latest MacOS send reports to Apple servers.

>Spotlight search sends users' search terms to Apple.

Most of this is complaining about telemetry, which is a valid thing to be concerned about.

https://github.com/fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home

Not OP, but back when Yosemite came out, there was a lot of buzz about privacy issues, such as:

https://github.com/fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/mac-o...

Don't know what came out of these things in later OS X versions.