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  • Hacker News
  • Everyone wearing their tinfoil hat while using Gmail and drive for everything
    by zer0zzz
  • > while using Gmail and drive for everything

    I don't.

    by lapcat
  • Gmail doesn't pretend to be private.
    by cynicalsecurity
  • It's previous recipients synced over iCloud.

    Run this and then send an email to see it: log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.cloudkit"' --info --debug

    by tomasf
  • Verified - and the actual payload to the iCloud endpoint is e2e encrypted ciphertext.
    by pinkyboy
  • Why’s this post below an older less popular one? https://i.ibb.co/jnpcFJz/IMG-0549.jpg
    by Barbing
  • because rankings take other things into account, such as the time of the post
    by stronglikedan
  • TIL there’s an app for that

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513

    Recent Flock, BMW, iCloud stories not logged there - three I noticed. Take that robot, human took an advantage!

    by Barbing
  • Jeff Johnson is an Apple privacy information hero and deserves every penny for his apps like StopTheMadness https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness
    by Barbing
  • I agree, though I don’t think it’s relevant to this post.
    by gumby
  • Some stats on this downranked(?) post: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49156299
    by Barbing
  • Isn't this Private Relay masking your IP? https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602

    The article calls out Safari but my understanding is it applies to email also.

    by datakan
  • No, I don't use Private Relay or subscribe to iCloud+
    by lapcat
  • A dead comment said It's previous recipients synced over iCloud. And said how to see this.[1] Vouch it if you can.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158388

    by pseudalopex
  • I think this is correct, and I've now added addendums to the blog post.
    by lapcat
  • One Apple Mail feature nobody here has commented on was called Piano Mover internally. I don’t know the public marketing name. It lets attachments over 10MB in emails be replaced with iCloud hosted file references.
    by kridsdale1
  • the marketing name is "Mail Drop", and it is separate from iCloud mail; though it should only fire if there's a 20mb+ attachment on the email.

    cloudd is used by a shit-ton of services though, so I'm not sure how to track it down without better tracing of what actually initiated the call, or the contents of the call.

    edit: tomasf nailed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158388

    by pinkyboy
  • I think every major email hosting provider (that's not a dumb IMAP only platform) has some variant of this.
    by Onavo
  • I wonder if "Piano Mover" is a reference to the Goon Show episode called "Napoleon’s Piano" [1]

    If you like absurdly silly comedy; Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, you should track these down. These were made in the 1950's for BBC Radio.

    [1] https://goonshow.org/goonshow/s6p4/

    by VogonPoetry
  • I assume for the same reason the OS pings Cupertino when you run a binary - surveillance, masquerading as protection.
    by bantunes
  • Yes, the safe assumption is that Apple reads all your mail. Not that any other provider is better---most are probably worse.
    by SoftTalker
  • Probably Handoff and cross-device application state syncing.
    by speak_plainly
  • Why would a local facility like handoff need to talk to the mother ship?
    by gumby
  • I've disabled Handoff.

    Also, why would Handoff be triggered by sending an email rather than composing an email? Mail app uses IMAP for syncing mailboxes.

    by lapcat
  • Most likely answer so far. While writing an email you can take it over between iPhone, iPad and Mac. Once you hit send it probably gives a “you can stop Handoff now” signal.
    by artisinal
  • Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.
    by transcriptase
  • Pack-in slopware and it's consequences have been a disaster for the desktop operating system duopoly.
    by bigyabai
  • OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.
    by dylan604
  • You’re giving me ptsd of LittleSnitch + any Adobe (or microsoft) product.

    You seriously can’t even use the machine without blanket, permanent approvals… the endless flood of network requests is paralyzing.

    by dd8601fn