I could not agree more. I run Fedora on my desktop, and iOS and OS X on my iPhone and MacBook respectively. When I read posts like this, I can't help but think

I could not agree more. I run Fedora on my desktop, and iOS and OS X on my iPhone and MacBook respectively. When I read posts like this, I can't help but think "How long will it be until I'm unable to do any compute without being tied to an online account?". Most people (including myself) have no idea what is going on in their smartphone, tablet or desktop PC. I can trust Fedora somewhat more, but as an exercise, leave tcpdump running on your OS X device and the amount of non-local network chatter is unbelievable. Furthmore, why is it when you delete a photo from your iPhone it can persist on iCloud for up to 30 days? Likewise, why is it when I restore my iPhone and set it up from scratch it starts to download 100MB + of data over WiFi? [1] [1]. When I setup my iPhone from scratch (Apple ID, iCloud disabled), it hammered my WiFi at the full RX rate of my DSL line for approx. 10 minutes. That's 4Mbps * 60 * 10 = 2400Mbits = 300MB. I made sure that my iPhone was the only device connected to my WiFi. What could be in that 300MB of data? I should proxy all traffic from my WiFi to my DSL modem via another PC and do tcpdump on that!