Based on Apple's past history, they do not want to sell your personal data. That's Google's modus operandi, and common for other companies too, but Apple has de

Based on Apple's past history, they do not want to sell your personal data. That's Google's modus operandi, and common for other companies too, but Apple has demonstrated time and time again that they are focused on the user. To that end, there's 2 things going on here: 1. Apple added functionality called Spotlight Suggestions, which pulls in data from the internet, including things like iTunes and App Store results, wikipedia results, movie showtimes, etc. It's basically a form of the specialized search results you get in search engines (such as Google, Bing, and, yes, even DuckDuckGo) where it tries to extract semantic meaning from your query and give you the result inline. This is generally considered very useful for search engines, and Apple decided they wanted Spotlight to have this behavior. I think this makes sense. Spotlight is basically Sherlock 2.0, so this finally restores behavior that Sherlock (and Watson before it) had (although Sherlock/Watson required you to explicitly search the various providers, whereas Spotlight decides when to do the searches based on its own interpretation of the query). The privacy implication here is that searches used with Spotlight Suggestions are sent to Apple, so they can improve Spotlight Suggestions. This is something that web search engines already have, and is important for making the functionality behave better. This data is not shared with anyone else, sold, or monetized. And yes, I believe Apple when they say that. Also to note, this is basically exactly what already happens with Siri. Your Siri queries are sent to Apple (so they can actually be answered), and that information is used to make Siri better. 2. The second part of this is Bing Web Searches. It appears most queries don't even go to Bing. I tried a random sampling of queries and never saw any search results. The Privacy button states that "Searches for common words and phrases will be forwarded from Apple to Microsoft's Bing search engine", which makes it sound like Bing only even sees the search if Spotlight determines that it can't handle this query with local data or Spotlight Suggestions. Which is to say, this does not mean that Microsoft sees every search you do. It seems they only see some searches, which are for "common words and phrases". Also, according to this, "These searches are not stored by Microsoft", which suggests that Apple's contract with Microsoft puts restrictions on them regarding how they can use the search. --- Ultimately, Apple only cares about what makes the user experience better. They're in the hardware business. That's where their money comes from. And they're successful precisely because whenever they're given the choice between something that might make more money, vs something that makes the user experience better, they choose the latter every single time. And monetizing searches does not make the user experience better.