"In addition to searching your Mac, Spotlight now shows suggestions from the Internet, iTunes, App Store, locations nearby, and more. To make suggestions more relevant to you, Spotlight includes your approximate location with search requests to Apple. You can change this in Preferences. Learn more…"
Clicking on "Learn more" also tells you how to disable it. The python script is neat but a bit exaggerated IMHO.
Then I manually went into Spotlight settings, and was presented with a bunch of checkboxes that offer zero indication as to privacy implications. How am I to magically tell that the "Movies" option won't send my query to some Apple IMDB proxy?
Sorry, but this script is spot on. This should not be enabled by default, and the privacy implications need to be spelt out in every single detail. It should be a legal requirement, really.
There's a very prominent button labelled
> About Spotlight Suggestions & Privacy
on the Spotlight preferences window. If you're worried about the privacy of your searches, you can click that, and you get a detailed description of exactly what's going on, and how to disable it (to wit, uncheck "Spotlight Suggestions" and "Bing Web Searches").
The idea that having a button in the bowels of a preference menu is sufficient is...I don't want to say "nuts", but I'm thinking it pretty hard. I'm not happy. Not unhappy enough to subject myself to a Linux desktop, but Apple is making it closer and closer with every release.
> in the bowels of a preference menu
This is not the first time you've resorted to hyperbole in order to try and paint Apple in a bad light. It's not hidden anywhere. The moment you go to the Spotlight preferences, you see it.
What's more, the first time you see a search result that came from the internet, a) it should be obvious that means that your query must have gone to the internet, and b) the very first place you'd go in order to disable this behavior, the Spotlight Preferences Pane, is the same place that has this prominent button that gives you a detailed explanation.
> Not unhappy enough to subject myself to a Linux desktop, but Apple is making it closer and closer with every release.
It sounds to me like you're trying to invent reasons to hate Apple. This is a widely-advertised major feature of the OS (it was even in the WWDC keynote IIRC), with a very prominent warning explaining how Spotlight is different in this version of the OS and making it very easy to find out how to disable this behavior, with a very prominent button in preferences called "Privacy" that, again, explains what's going on and how to disable it. And yet you're trying to insinuate that Apple is trying to stealthily sneak in the behavior that sends your queries to them, without letting the user know, as if that was something they'd even want to do.
Really, this thread just looks like a bunch of paranoid conspiracy nuts, thinking Apple is out to steal your searches. I get it, privacy is important. I don't disagree. But you're* acting like they installed a keylogger on your computer (in point of fact, someone on IRC accused Apple of making "something that sends all of their local query keystrokes to Apple", which is a pure fabrication).
* that's the plural "you", not you personally
By the way, there's a perfectly good English word that means "plural you minus you personally," which is "they."
> By the way, there's a perfectly good English word that means "plural you minus you personally," which is "they."
If I was talking to you personally, one-on-one, I'd use "they". I used "you" because I was speaking to the larger audience of the people involved in this thread.
Based on the consistency of the delay, I assumed it was doing the quick local search for the top hit, and then deferring the more expensive searches (including internet-enabled searches) until it's decided that it's time to show the results window. So I tested it, sniffing http traffic, and while I didn't pinpoint which particular queries are sent by Spotlight, there was reliably a burst of HTTP traffic right before the results window was shown every time, and no noticeable HTTP traffic before then. This suggests that my assumption is correct, that it's not doing the internet-enabled search until it believes that the user is done typing.
Based on this, if you type your search and hit return immediately, then it won't have sent your query anywhere.
Going further, what makes you think I give a material shit about Apple's PR materials? I don't read about OS X releases, I upgrade when they show up because I trusted (past tense) Apple to do the right thing. Something you can bypass without even acknowledging it is at best sneaky. If Apple thought this was seriously all that and a bag of potato chips, an opt-in is real easy.
Be better than defending this, man. It's dirty.
And besides all that, apparently this issue doesn't even affect you. If you launch Spotlight, type "it", and hit Return, in order to launch iTerm, to the best of my knowledge, Spotlight won't have even sent your query to Apple. It had a local application result to deliver, and you accepted it without waiting for more results. From playing with it myself, and from watching patterns of network traffic, it appears to me that it doesn't even initiate the search unless it thinks you don't want the first result.
The only thing dirty here is your desire to publicly accuse Apple of bad behavior when you blindly installed a brand new major OS upgrade without reading anything about it, ignored the blatant message they gave you, ignored every single visual cue about how the functionality you were using has been radically changed, and then read on the internet that there was a possibility that your search queries might be sent to Apple and freaked out.
And I don't know what they're not asking me to opt into sending. That's the fucking problem. You can play with it all you want and fiddle with it however you like to determine you're okay with it, that's fine. I am blanket not okay with remote services receiving local anything by default. I got pissed when Ubuntu did it, I'm pissed when Apple does it.
> And I don't know [...] * That's the fucking problem*
Yes, that is the fucking problem. You're arguing very loudly about something you don't know anything about.
It was wrong when Ubuntu did it with the Amazon lens crap. It's wrong when Apple does it. They're not special.
"In addition to searching your Mac, Spotlight now shows suggestions from the Internet, iTunes, App Store, movie showtimes, locations nearby, and more. To make suggestions more relevant to you, Spotlight includes your approximate location with search requests to Apple."
Seems pretty clear to me. It also might be a subtle clue that you are getting various kinds of search results from the Internet.
There's also very easy-to-understand hand-holding built right into the UI to help you disable it, if you want to.
It's pretty obvious, for the non-obtuse at least, that if you extend the functionality of a feature such that it searches the Internet, that means it's going to actually search the internet, which means sending your search terms to external services.
It's at best shitty UX and at worst dirty.
Really what would you do with the UI to make this feature prominit enough to the user?
May point about the script was more that it also just disables the two things listed in the initial privacy info given by Apple, i.e. "MENU_WEBSEARCH" and "MENU_SPOTLIGHT_SUGGESTIONS" and having informative text with screenshots to which checkboxes to unselect on the website would have sufficed. At least you wouldn't be executing code from some random place on the internet.