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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

The telemetry for Windows is a frequent topic here, could anyone clarify/compare the story for Mac OS?

In the Apple ecosystem you are asked once when setting up a new device if you would like to enable telemetry.

Apple devices still phone home constantly with things that amount to telemetry when you use them, even with analytics disabled.

Opening the App Store app, for example, sends your hardware serial number. Macs and iOS both maintain hardware-serial-linked 24/7 connections to Apple's push servers, too.

There aren't opt out UI settings available for the majority of Apple's phone-home.

The situation is a little better compared to Windows, but it's not perfect.

I always disable telemetry, but iphonesubmissions.apple.com:443, radarsubmissions.apple.com:443 and securemetrics.apple.com:443 are still contacted.

People messing with ocsp.apple.com:80 (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1460) also need to be aware of ocsp2.apple.com:443.

The iAdSDK setting is somewhat respected, but all the Siri subdomains are pinged even if Siri is turned off.

I’ve never had to try and remove ads from macOS to the extent that I do with windows 10, it’s not devoid of advertising but not quite as bad

Moving the goalposts. The parent was asking about telemetry specifically.

You get ads on Windows 10? I've never seen a third party ad. They have had an ad for Office which was a live tile (which I have disabled because I do not find them useful.

Also not me, but American friends have always complained about this so I presume that they don't want to anger some regulators in countries where they don't put ads.

They were in the start menu. Ads for software and games. There was that candy crush saga game for ages.

Indeed even here in Europe. Cleaning the start menu from all that crap is the first thing I always do. I empty out the entire right hand side, because if you do so it actually disappears! But many updates put things back there.

Ads are telemetry now? Is "telemetry" just a catch all for "anything software does that I don't like"?

I'm pretty sure computer ads have always been telemetry.

This is a unique definition of “telemetry” as it usually requires collection of data. Some ads use telemetry for better targeting, but that isn’t all ads and definitely wasn’t true when things like banner ads were first introduced.

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