This data amounts to a tremendous trove of data about your life and habits, and allows someone possessing all of it to identify your movement and activity patterns. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019. Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community’s PRISM spying program, which grants the US federal police and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables. These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city. This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings:ĭate, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application HashĪpple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.īecause it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about. I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. others: email translations in markdown format to here.There have been several updates appended to this page as of, please see below.

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