zerosleeps

I’ve just set up a new iPhone and the process was… not designed for me. I wanted to set the thing up from scratch. Clean slate. But as far as I can tell that’s pretty much impossible because as soon as you give iPhone your Apple ID, it’s going to suck down all sorts of stuff that I didn’t even know Apple was storing.

iOS obviously defaults to sending everything it possibly can to iCloud-or-whatever-it’s-called, and you’ve got to painstakingly turn stuff off app-by-app. But turning it off doesn’t always delete what is already stored by Apple, so my new iPhone was handed all sorts of junk, some of it from years ago.

For example I use 1Password and to my surprise (and not in the good way) 1Password already had my username and secret key. Where the hell did it get them from?! “iCloud Keychain” appears to be the answer, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to see or amend what is stored in this mysterious keychain. The Passwords app doesn’t show anything, and buggered if I can find anywhere else to look.

We really have passed a point of no return, where everyone just expects to be able to take a new computer out of it’s box and pick up exactly where they left off. Which is appealing, I understand that. But what about the minority of people like me who actually give a shit about their own data?