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Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by semiquaver on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:53AM (#50405582)
It all lives on your device. Apple literally doesn’t have custody of the data so it’s not relevant to the GDPR. It’s your data.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by sneak on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:57AM (#50405614)
Were that were so!

iCloud Backup, on by default, is not end to end encrypted and uploads almost the entire contents of your device to Apple’s servers every night in a format they can read (effectively unencrypted). This includes your entire message history over SMS and iMessage and all attachments thereto.

It is safe to assume that the data collected and assembled by these daemons is part of the iCloud Backup, which you never have to explicitly enable; it happens when you log in to iCloud on the device, usually within minutes of first powering it on for most people.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by semiquaver on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:59AM (#50405629)
This data is not included in iCloud backup. That detail is included in the article.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by sneak on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:24PM (#50407223)
> This data is not included in iCloud backup. That detail is included in the article.

The word "backup" does not appear at all in that webpage? Your claim is unsubstantiated. For these features to work, they must be running on iOS as well, for people who don't own a mac. Siri is used more on mobile devices than on desktops, generally.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by shuckles on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:59AM (#50405631)
Photos aren’t in iCloud Backup. Have you considered doing the bare minimum to understand the features you complain about?
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by sneak on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:26PM (#50407239)
They don't need to be; Photos are synced in realtime to Apple without e2ee. Apple already has them, even faster than the nightly backup.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by 1over137 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:18AM (#50405754)
>iCloud Backup, on by default

iCloud is not on by default with macOS. For starters, you have to create an iCloud account!

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by kogir on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:20AM (#50405774)
While not the default, with Advanced Data Protection, iCloud Backup does encrypt backups end to end. It’s available in most jurisdictions.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#advanced

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by coldtea on Saturday November 07, 2026 @01:36PM (#50406829)
Also available to any other app with "full disk access" to just read and upload. A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by tpmoney on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:57PM (#50407501)
Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).

It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by hparadiz on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:35PM (#50409737)
This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by coldtea on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:05PM (#50409870)
>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.

That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by tpmoney on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:14PM (#50410362)
Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by astafrig on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:51PM (#50409519)
> A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).

I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.

Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by woadwarrior01 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:32AM (#50412011)
Which is why Apple is so skittish about "full disk access".

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw