New 10.4.7 ‘dashboardadvisoryd’ Daemon Phones Home to Apple.com

Daniel Jalkut reports on ‘dashboardadvisoryd’, a new background daemon Apple added to 10.4.7 that phones home to Apple.com every eight hours so that you can confirm that the Dashboard widgets you download are identical to the ones featured on Apple.com. A clever idea, and almost certainly harmless, in and of itself, but this sort of secretive “phoning home” feature — which wasn’t announced and which can’t be turned off without hacking skills — really gets people worked up.

When you introduce a feature such as this, no matter how innocuous the data is that’s transmitted back and forth over the wire, you must explicitly inform the user about the feature and give them an option to turn it off.

★ Thursday, 6 July 2006