I’m a new Mac user, and am finding that I need an apple account to do quite a lot of stuff. It would also be helpful to have an apple account in order to link up with subscriptions on my phone etc. However, I’m wondering what the privacy implications of this are: for instance, can websites on visits ‘see’ the apple account one is logged in with and therefore identify you? Or does this give apple meaningfully more sight of your identity than they do already? Grateful for some views more informed than my own!
Hi! No fortunately websites aren’t able to see your Apple account, it’s just for logging into Apple services and syncing all your stuff up on your Mac. The main privacy implications are that Apple would know that Mac is yours because it’s now linked to your account and any apps you install from the App Store would also be linked to your account, things like that.
Be mindful of where your Apple iCloud server is located. There are countries that Apple bows down to in order to comply with local laws, such as China and your unencrypted stuff in the cloud is fair game to its gov’t.
Hi Fria - and thanks for the guidance. Apologies taken so long to follow up, but I find this really helpful. I suppose I was going on the assumption that Apple could already probably figure out who I was if they really wanted to, so I’m not too perturbed by that.
Only question I suppose (if you don’t mind my following up) is whether signing in with an apple ID gives apple sight of anything much more than they originally would have had - e.g. can they now suddenly see all my document content, or my web browsing (through sensible browsers) or something in a way that they couldn’t before?
For Safari, that data is always E2EE for iCloud syncing so no. They cannot see your browsing.
For other data that depends on your settings. If you have iCloud disabled then no, they don’t see anything as it is all local to your machine. If you enable iCloud it depends on whether or not you enable ADP. I suggest looking through this article from Apple explaining each data category and how the data is protected:
