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Jeffery Paul, a Berlin security researcher has a complaint about the latest OS X version:
"Fast forward to 10.10. Presumably to support Continuity, current document state is no longer only saved locally - those in-progress (not yet explicitly “saved”) documents live in iCloud Drive, so that they can be opened on other devices without ever having to hit “save”. This is useful, however, all of my previous open files have now been synchronized to Apple servers.
Notice that all of my locally-stored, “unsaved” documents open in my text editor have now been uploaded in full to a partner in NSA’s PRISM program. This happens for all applications (think iA Writer, Pixelmator, etc.) that had saved application state. Any open and yet-unsaved document within an app is now silently and automatically uploaded to iCloud Drive, and, by extension, the government.
Apple has taken local files on my computer not stored in iCloud and silently and without my permission uploaded them to their servers - across all applications, Apple and otherwise.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @03:37AM
I didn't think this was a problem at first. I'd had to specifically upgrade to and enable iCloud Drive. It wasn't the default setting. Moreover, there's a preference pane for specifying which apps can interact with iCloud, so I can specify which applications work with iCloud. I thought I knew what was and wasn't uploading.
Then, I was dismayed to see DayOne active in the preference pane. It's a journal for recording one's private thoughts, and I'd specificlaly disabled iCloud syncing within the program prior to installing Yosemite; I'd been through a rough patch and used DayOne to get me through it, and I'd disabled iCloud syncing prior to Yosemite because I didn't want those thoughts going onto anyone's server, no matter how secure. The upgrade to iCloud Drive put the saved application state there. That's bad, because DayOne doesn't actually encrypt any of the journal entries, despite having a "password" feature on its own interface. It's these kind of third-party applications that you might not be expecting to use iCloud that are the problem.
Apple could (and probably should) fix this by defaulting all programs not to use iCloud Drive, and making the user explicitly grant permission to upload state data for each program, rather than going with an opt-out approach.