If you’re an avid Apple fan chances are you’ve already heard about the new and improved Spotlight Search within the new Yosemite Apple operating system for Mac. Spotlight Search gives the company access to people’s search queries, but also to the location of their computers by tracking your IP address to a geographic region. You’re only way to avoid that whole bit is to deactivate Spotlight Search completely. Now granted Apple does state that the data they collect lasts on their servers for around 15 minutes, however here’s the tricky part. Since Bing is the default search engine within Spotlight Search – Microsoft is privy to some of that data as-well.
“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.”
This means that while it won’t get anonymous information about the individual who was searching for shoes, such as IP address, it will still get data about where they are in a city, which is more or less the same thing. Just because that individual’s location can’t be pin pointed to a few miles, it doesn’t mean much for companies who will use the data for their profiling and advertising needs.