The text when you open spotlight explains that it's looking on the internet. The first icon is safari. Every search you do, including siri, kortana, and ok google sends information to the respective company. Apparently bendgate didn't satisfy the fans, so they had to come up with a tortured reason to be all upset. I really tire of this horse shit, and would expect better.
I disabled spotlight suggestions in the preferences but didn't in Safari (since it never came into my mind that I'd need to disable it there too).
When I searched on safari, I didn't see spotlight suggestions but I can confirm that it phoned home.
I don't get why people get so defensive when it's just a simple fact. Even someone technically minded like me who actually disabled Spotlight suggestions in Preferences because I didn't want to send information to Apple, ended up sending information when searching on Safari. This is an issue.
I expect Safari to communicate with the web, I just don't expect it to send my search data to apple's server when I selected Duck Duck Go as a search engine and when I disabled Spotlight suggestion in the preferences. Having to disable "Spotlight suggestion" a second time in Safari's preferences is the issue and is what I blame Apple.
Would you be bothered if full video of your browser window was constantly streamed to Apple by default, with no ability to erase footage? If not, I don't know what to say. But if so, being told "It's just communicating with the web, what'd you expect from a browser?" wouldn't help, would it?
Obviously this is the extreme, and I'm not likening sending search queries to fulltime video surveillance, but the point is people have different thresholds of what they will tolerate. Apparently most HN users' tolerance is high, or at least they are willing to defend Apple on this for whatever reasons. Some of ours is low, so that's why we are complaining.
These threads are amazing. I thought this was a reasonable explanation of my problem with this, and an attempt to show why people disagree, and how we can empathize better. But I get downmodded with no response. Is my opinion really so stupid that it doesn't deserve a response or to be read by anyone else? Is the idea that these things should be opt-in (or much more transparent), to protect privacy, so foreign, that I'm assumed to be trolling or merely anti-Apple if I espouse it? I expected at least "That's your ideological position on opt-in vs. opt-out, on which we simply disagree."
Maybe people got the message, irreconcilably disagree, and are sick of reading it again. I don't know why you'd still be in the thread, then.
All of my comments in this thread started with negative points from down votes then stabilised. It seems that whenever there's a controversial topic, there are a few people who down vote every comment that goes against their viewpoint.
I've had the impression that people who have the ability to down vote are reasonable and well-respected in the community, so it kind of surprises me that these things happen. Maybe down voting just seems lofty to me because I'm not karmic enough to have it.
It's also funny that I talked about being downvoted, and am now a little above 0 afterward, oops. I figured the thread was dying down and I'd respond before it was abandoned completely.
Getting enough karma to downvote doesn't really mean that much, it just means you've been here long enough and maybe submitted a few articles that got on the front page (it's much easier to get karma by submitting articles).
