On the surface, it’s an egregious invasion of privacy.

Let’s take a look at exactly what’s going on here.

If you’re also using Location Services, that info gets sent as well.

This sounds scary at a glance, but let’s think about why it does this.

It isn’t just Spotlight and Safari.

Using Net Monitor,users foundthat a myriad of stats are sent to Apple.

For Spotlight Suggestions we minimize the amount of information sent to Apple.

Apple doesn’t retain IP addresses from users' devices.

Spotlight blurs the location on the machine so it never sends an exact location to Apple.

Apple devices only use a temporary anonymous session ID for a 15-minute period before the ID is discarded.

We also worked closely with Microsoft to protect our users' privacy.

Apple forwards only commonly searched terms and only city-level location information to Bing.

Microsoft does not store search queries or receive users' IP addresses.

Since his blog post,other users have found similar behaviorin a variety of apps that use iCloud Drive.

Before Yosemite, in-progress files were automatically saved locally on your hard drive until you explicitly saved them elsewhere.

Yosemite introduced a new function where those documents are autosaved every couple of seconds.

If you don’t want your data in the cloud, this is a problem.

This is a feature of Yosemite called Continuity.

Apple even has apage up describing how it works.

That’s the whole point of it.

I’m fine with things that I haven’t saved being stored on the hard disk.

I’m OK with that.

I think it’s a nice feature.

At a glance, his outcry seems justified.

However, Yosemite’s features wouldn’t work if it didn’t behave this way.

How else would Continuity work?

It’s a basic requirement for the feature.

What you might Do About It

Thankfully, you might work around these privacy issues pretty easily.

Head to System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results and uncheck those two boxes.

Disable Safari’s Spotlight Suggestions.

Head to Safari > Preferences > Search and uncheck Spotlight Suggestions.

It’s also a good idea to disable location information if you’re worried about giving that data away.

As for autosave and Continuity, you have a few options.

You’ll have to manually choose to save them to iCloud Drive.

This data is required for the basic functions of its operating system.

you might disable both of these features, but privacy advocates believe they should be disabled by default.

The reactions we’ve seen so far are certainly justified, but they’re a little overblown.