If you wanted to see if an app is sending "telemetry data", you'd have to inspect the process with Activity Viewer (or ps and lsof on the CLI) and then decrypt the packet payload and inspect the payload's content. Which, you probably won't be able to do unless you do a man in the middle attack against the HTTPS traffic.
Yeah, I have done this. Also just using normal stuff like littlesnitch will show a lot of ‘where are things going when i do x’ which reveals some things without having to do the fancy interception. I have done both, though.
I understand Apple isn’t exposing
what - my point is the larger ‘this has become normalized and shouldn’t be’ aspect, which is true, is being exposed - and that is good. The amount of hooks the Gemini app installs on macOS is egregious,
without asking, as one recent example.
People should be aware of what their devices are doing, regardless of the intent. If there is a license check that fires every second (which was the case with a flagship audio interface, for example), that’s not only something worth knowing, it’s a bad development practice to not have timeouts and sensible intervals. I’m just using this as an example, I reported this and the developer corrected the stupid code but it shouldn’t have left the company like that and got caught because i was paying attention to what new programs were doing on my machine.
It’s sort of like how the modern web uses javascript to obfuscate all kinds of things. You can’t get rid of data brokers (until society decides to) but you can limit the amount of data they get, to some degree, and for the people who care to do the work to do that even if it’s just to run simple adblockers (and crucially, in-app ad blockers like the new filtr), it is worthwhile to pay attention.
The tens of thousands of blocks I have every single week on my edge device say that it actually is the vast majority of network requests, I’m sorry to say. The tech industry is a mess and much like the App Store nutrition labels (which I was tangentially involved with), this is a step in a direction that doesn’t solve anything but brings some awareness to people who do want to look further into it and might not have otherwise.
On iOS, it’s illuminating how many things actually work just fine if you have background app refresh off. It’s upward of 95% of apps that I use, even messengers since push notifications can still get through. Also saves on battery. On a mac turning that off globally would be nuts, of course.
Things running in the background are fine, but knowing
what is …is also good. It’s win-win, but it might cause some more news stories and scrutiny when (slightly) bad actors take liberties.
