Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.
MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.
OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.
Most likely answer so far. While writing an email you can take it over between iPhone, iPad and Mac. Once you hit send it probably gives a “you can stop Handoff now” signal.
One Apple Mail feature nobody here has commented on was called Piano Mover internally. I don’t know the public marketing name. It lets attachments over 10MB in emails be replaced with iCloud hosted file references.
the marketing name is "Mail Drop", and it is separate from iCloud mail; though it should only fire if there's a 20mb+ attachment on the email.
cloudd is used by a shit-ton of services though, so I'm not sure how to track it down without better tracing of what actually initiated the call, or the contents of the call.
For a company who hangs their hat on privacy, it is a dang shame that their native mail client can't support PGP/GnuPG. I mean it'll do S/MIME, but who uses that regularly.
I admire your work greatly then. I definitely appreciate uncovering this sort of telemetry, but I feel the reaction from some may be a little more Tin-foil-hatted for my taste. I do thank you for doing the work though!
I also applaud you for not using the mainstream thing. That’s good too.
Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.
You’re giving me ptsd of LittleSnitch + any Adobe (or microsoft) product.
You seriously can’t even use the machine without blanket, permanent approvals… the endless flood of network requests is paralyzing.
MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.
OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.
Office apps no longer autosave unless you have OneDrive installed. So no autosave for me! Instead I save compulsively lie the days of floppy disk PCs.
(Meanwhile Emacs has had autosave since at least 1977)
Older office 2019 or 21 I think with massgrave.
Libreoffice.
I'm more and more relying less on office nowadays.
Pack-in slopware and it's consequences have been a disaster for the desktop operating system duopoly.
Probably Handoff and cross-device application state syncing.
Most likely answer so far. While writing an email you can take it over between iPhone, iPad and Mac. Once you hit send it probably gives a “you can stop Handoff now” signal.
Why would a local facility like handoff need to talk to the mother ship?
I've disabled Handoff.
Also, why would Handoff be triggered by sending an email rather than composing an email? Mail app uses IMAP for syncing mailboxes.
One Apple Mail feature nobody here has commented on was called Piano Mover internally. I don’t know the public marketing name. It lets attachments over 10MB in emails be replaced with iCloud hosted file references.
the marketing name is "Mail Drop", and it is separate from iCloud mail; though it should only fire if there's a 20mb+ attachment on the email.
cloudd is used by a shit-ton of services though, so I'm not sure how to track it down without better tracing of what actually initiated the call, or the contents of the call.
I think every major email hosting provider (that's not a dumb IMAP only platform) has some variant of this.
A dead comment said It's previous recipients synced over iCloud. And said how to see this.[1] Vouch it if you can.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158388
I think this is correct, and I've now added addendums to the blog post.
I assume for the same reason the OS pings Cupertino when you run a binary - surveillance, masquerading as protection.
Yes, the safe assumption is that Apple reads all your mail. Not that any other provider is better---most are probably worse.
I don't think they read all of it. Probably just metadata. But would be good to know what's being sent.
Assume their AI agent now file system indexer is reading all your email on their behalf.
For a company who hangs their hat on privacy, it is a dang shame that their native mail client can't support PGP/GnuPG. I mean it'll do S/MIME, but who uses that regularly.
Isn't this Private Relay masking your IP? https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
The article calls out Safari but my understanding is it applies to email also.
No, I don't use Private Relay or subscribe to iCloud+
Why’s this post below an older less popular one? https://i.ibb.co/jnpcFJz/IMG-0549.jpg
because rankings take other things into account, such as the time of the post
Jeff Johnson is an Apple privacy information hero and deserves every penny for his apps like StopTheMadness https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness
I agree, though I don’t think it’s relevant to this post.
Everyone wearing their tinfoil hat while using Gmail and drive for everything
Gmail doesn't pretend to be private.
> while using Gmail and drive for everything
I don't.
You’d be in the minority.
I'd also be the author of the submitted article.
I admire your work greatly then. I definitely appreciate uncovering this sort of telemetry, but I feel the reaction from some may be a little more Tin-foil-hatted for my taste. I do thank you for doing the work though!
I also applaud you for not using the mainstream thing. That’s good too.
It's previous recipients synced over iCloud.
Run this and then send an email to see it: log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.cloudkit"' --info --debug