Here here! All this phone-home stuff is a non-starter. Apple thinks we don't have any options. And the thing is, they're right...for now, for this quarter. Alternatives suck.
But consumer demand is a game changer. Vote with your dollar -- I'm just not entirely sure where yet. Ideas?
It's not about consumer demand, it's about legislation. We need functional legislation protecting consumer data. In the USA, the data is not your own to begin with. In the EU, the situation is somewhat better but also worse at the same time, as recent developments show — with government mandating obligatory communication surveillance agains the citizen's wishes.
You can vote with your dollar all you want, it makes no difference if the ISP/storage provider/communication company is really obliged to spy on you. And the "free" alternatives will always be a niche case as they lack the convenience and functionality of the commercial products. In fact, if everybody would drop Mac and Windows overnight and move to Linux, it would just take a couple of weeks before Linux would be flooded with malware. The only reason why Linux is "secure" is because most Linux installations run carefully setup server configurations behind professional security equipment and because it's desktop user share is so negligible that hackers simply don't care.
Apple can’t control third party hardware firewall behaviour, so one can attempt to block such connection outside Of macOS using something called USB computer stick. Dunno how routing traffic through it works but might worth a try. Or just good old fashion raspberry pi.
But then, apple can detect if Such connection exist, and stop the function altogether if monitoring can’t be continued. This means even deeper analysis needs to be performed to block that, until it is no longer possible.
Right now in my mind Apple is planning to go all out to plug every single loophole customer might come up with and enforce client based mass surveillance in the name of (insert good cause here). Apple has become a big villain.
Well, let's not go overboard with this either. Sure, Apple is opinionated, but I see no immediate reason to ascribe this kind of nefarious intent to them. They do not control third-party firewalls, and while they did try to exempt some system services from the filter API, they did quickly reversed their course when met with minimal resistance.
