Totally agree. Which is why I mentioned that I'm glad the OP posted about it and brought it to our attention. Apple is averse to asking users lots of questions

Totally agree. Which is why I mentioned that I'm glad the OP posted about it and brought it to our attention. Apple is averse to asking users lots of questions in general, but especially difficult questions that most won't understand or know how to answer -- or the implications of their choice. Pretending for a sec that Apple will change their default setting here, to the detriment of 99% of their users but to satisfy the noisy us... I'd love to see suggestions on how to word this checkbox option. iCloud has a lot of options already. It's a complicated concept for most people. I agree that this is borderline surprising behaviour, but I don't see how to avoid surprising someone.