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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something here? The web search / autocomplete functionality contacts some servers.. You can disable them. Mail client tries to fetch known IMAP / SMTP info for a given domain to ease setup.

Are there some weird data being sent? Honestly, I might have missed some concerning communication but as far as I can tell, this is just for the sake of added functionality and can be disabled.

Expecting OS level stuff to work without network data at year 2014 seems somewhat bizarre. This is like complaining that apt-get leaks info to home, telling about the packages you install.

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Expecting OS level stuff to work without network data at year 2014 seems somewhat bizarre. This is like complaining that apt-get leaks info to home, telling about the packages you install.

No, the difference is that people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category.

"people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category."

The irony of your comment, of course, is that this is a brand new feature that allows spotlight to include web content. So no, you don't have a general idea of what the feature does.

Spotlight is no longer a tool for searching local files, and is now a search tool which combines local and remote data.

You can disable this feature.

Which is an issue as this is not clearly stated, and it appears at first glance to be exactly like the desktop search tools we've been using for the past couple of decades.

UX design is partially about making pitfalls like this clear to users (and, where possible, getting rid of pitfalls altogether).

It is actually very clearly stated when you first use it (and every time thereafter, until you disable it):

http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2014/10/spotligh...

I think the various surveillance and privacy revelations of 2011-2013 have different opinions about network data in 2014...

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