I said no and Apple said yes
The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.
At the time Apple were generous enough to provide a setting to disable this feature.
macOS 15 Apple Intelligence setting.
Although they hid the second part deeper, because why should saying “no” be easy?
macOS 15 Apple Intelligence privacy setting.
Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment and upgraded macOS 15 to 27. I only skipped one major version, Apple skipped 10!
And today I discovered that Apple had removed the “no” switch.
The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer. When Apple advertised their deepfake feature back in June it became obvious Apple does not “think different.”
Digging through macOS 27 settings I turned off Siri (again). Of course, multiple unkillable Siri processes remain, stealing memory and writing data. For what purpose? Who knows. Note that they removed “Apple Intelligence” from this control.
macOS 27 Siri setting.
Trawling the web I discovered Apple has hidden settings under “Screen Time” restrictions. This is supposed to be for parental controls. These settings don’t disable Apple “Intelligence” but they do clean up various menus by hiding the slop tools.
All of this garbage was enabled after upgrading to macOS 27 despite me having “Apple Intelligence & Siri” turned off already. That was a rather explicit “no”, no?
The icing on this cake is the 22.28 GB brick clogging my disk space.
macOS 27 Apple Intelligence accounting for 22.28 GB.
Apple is charging £500/TB on new MacBooks so that is what, £11 they’ve stolen from me?
But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it. You cannot look away, it will be stuffed down your throat and if you say “no” they’ll cut out your tongue.
The AI industry is vile. My AI policy tried to list my concerns but it’s hopelessly outdated. I can’t keep up. Here’s just three of many headlines I collected this month:
- Despite Pledges From Musk, Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
- OpenAI Is Now Facing Over 50 Consumer Harm and Wrongful Death Lawsuits
- OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft
The list is endless. There is no limit to the human toll to keep this bubble inflated.
Call me a radical but I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires. Do you want another Epstein list? Because this is how you create another Epstein list. Fund a generation of psychopaths building on a foundation of non-consent and privacy invasion. Fantastic idea!
AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.