What do MacBook and macOS did not send data to Apple?

Privacy Questions
21

I’m using MacOS as a daily driver, have blocked no apps and am perfectly ok with it😀

22

It would be nice if someone could share some Little Snitch rules for more privacy.
I only use Apple Music and App Store sometimes.

I also switched from using Mail to Thunderbird because it doesn’t support PGP encryption with Ventura.

23

Yeah I was wondering how you were going to reconcile that and how manna was what kept the Israelites going for 40 years lol.

24

Unlikely that this happens at a large scale, because even without DNS requests being made, the socket connection itself is still obvious to everyone looking at network traffic. And macOS is quite ubiquitous, there are many people looking at the network traffic.

However, it might be a good choice if you target specific people. There are DGAs, why not also have a raw IP address version of that, that also only really sends traffic in very specific circumstances and not at scale? Much harder to prevent that from happening.

mDNSResponder (???)

Bonjour. Should be harmless. Is open source under Apache license: GitHub - apple-oss-distributions/mDNSResponder No way to know of course if they use the exact same version of the software that they open sourced, but if we assume malice on Apple’s part then using macOS is a fool’s game to begin with.

ShipIt (???)

Part of Squirrel. Basically a framework used by several different apps for auto-updating. Especially Electron-based apps afaik. Not part of macOS.

I’m using MacOS as a daily driver, have blocked no apps and am perfectly ok with it😀

Great, then you don’t share the issue/question that OP has.

how manna was what kept the Israelites going for 40 years lol.

Proprietary software has kept some companies afloat for far too long. I guess that can be said :smiley:

1 Like
25

Google 6:28 - 6:29

Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works Google requires?”

Jesus answered, “Authentication is required. You need to sign into your Google Account”

26

I installed Lulu, unchecked “Allow Apple Programs” and started collecting data.
Below is a link to all the applications and services reported by Lulu.

Data collected from macOS Sonoma 14.2 (23C64):

I hope it will be useful to someone.

I’m in the process of transferring data to a new Linux computer.

Thank you all for your replies.

Thanks @Dkama for the suggestion!

1 Like
27

Thanks for this. :grinning:

28

And can you please tell what to do with “configd”?

29

Oh sorry I skipped that one. I am allowing configd.

Don’t remember why anymore, probably breaks the updates if blocked.

1 Like
30

Just one more caveat, @Anonymous126 @gnln0jb6: I still catch a lot of calls to Apple bloatware via DNS filtering…

31

I have a concern that our efforts to block calls to the Apple system may be futile. Can you assure me that our attempts are not merely superficial? Thanks :slight_smile:

32

Well fundamentally, “[blocking] calls to the Apple system” is futile, it’s badness enumeration and you’re inherently trusting Apple by using their OS regardless. If you still want to use Apple hardware more privately then you might want to look into Asahi, with the caveat that you won’t have proper graphics acceleration until at least next year but you are still trusting Apple (though there is hardware design that makes it a bit harder for them to remotely fuck with you, check the Asahi docs to learn more)

2 Likes
33

Thanks for replying :slight_smile: