// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
I said no and Apple said yes
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Bluesky
The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.
At the time Apple were generous enough to provide a setting to disable this feature.
Although they hid the second part deeper, because why should saying “no” be easy?
Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment and upgraded macOS 15 to 27. I only skipped one major version, Apple skipped 10!
And today I discovered that Apple had removed the “no” switch.
The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer. When Apple advertised their deepfake feature back in June it became obvious Apple does not “think different.”
Digging through macOS 27 settings I turned off Siri (again). Of course, multiple unkillable Siri processes remain, stealing memory and writing data. For what purpose? Who knows. Note that they removed “Apple Intelligence” from this control.
Trawling the web I discovered Apple has hidden settings under “Screen Time” restrictions. This is supposed to be for parental controls. These settings don’t disable Apple “Intelligence” but they do clean up various menus by hiding the slop tools.
All of this garbage was enabled after upgrading to macOS 27 despite me having “Apple Intelligence & Siri” turned off already. That was a rather explicit “no”, no?