> I'm amazed at the reaction

And I'm baffled by yours, and others' in the thread. With the PRISM/Snowden revelations, Apple still refusing to encrypt their data center links, not using perfect forward secrecy, etc, the cloud simply doesn't seem like a good default.

They could make this opt-in, as it's supposedly linked to Continuity, but it's very clearly unintuitive, as evidenced by others in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511115 for one). If even HN people (probably at least the 95th percentile in tech literacy compared to the general pop) didn't know this, then what about your typical PEBKAC user?

And, sorry to be incendiary, but I'm sure the NSA isn't displeased by Apple's UX choice here.

I love it when people get all "incendiary" about a privacy issue in the post-Snowden world. I really do not understand what your privacy world view was in 2009. Did you think governments did not have intelligence agencies? Did you think every government employee was an angel? Did you think F500 companies regarded personal privacy sacrosanct? ?

Back then a reasonable person might have had faith in the rule of law, and in the oversight system and that targeted surveillance was the norm. It turns out there are secret courts, with secret interpretations of laws and indiscriminate mass data-collection. The tin-foil-hat brigade turned out to be right.

This behavior is completely intuitive to anyone that's used a Mac for the past 5+ years - iCloud has an option for syncing documents and data. Mac OS has been preserving unsaved files since at least Lion, and on iCloud since at least Mavericks. You can opt out of the latter if you like. Or not.

I (and I believe most people) honestly could care less about the NSA. If they want to get at you, they will. Period. There is no technical solution to what is fundamentally a political problem. Most Americans WANT to be spied on, because terror. I don't like it, don't support it, but I'm not losing sleep over it.