Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur

"You have to trust Apple", it's said. But I suspect that if you actually knew how much your Apple devices were phoning home to Cupertino, you wouldn't trust Apple anymore. Using Little Snitch (the kernel extension) was a real eye opener for me. Especially when I allowed Little Snitch to block all Apple processes (by disabling the built-in iCloud Services and macOS Services rule groups).

This may be a good time to remind folks of my blog post where I explain how Catalina phones home when you run unsigned executables, including shell scripts! In the article I mentioned that you can prevent this with Little Snitch. But that was the LS kext. Is it even possible anymore? https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/catalina-executables.htm...

Let me just quote one comment from the HN discussion of that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23278253 "Making this about speed is burying the lede. From a privacy and user-freedom perspective, it's horrifying. Don't think so? Apple now theoretically has a centralized database of every Mac user who's ever used youtube-dl. Or Tor. Or TrueCrypt."

It's all too easy to dismiss the privacy violations that we're not aware of. Out of sight, out of mind.