TUAW: Daniel Jalkut has discovered that the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update released last week is causing his computer to phone home to Apple. Every eight hours, a process called “dashboardadvisoryd” is contacting two different servers hosted by Apple, ostensibly to verify that the Dashboard plug-ins you have installed are the same versions as the ones provided by Apple. While this certainly isn’t as insidious as Microsoft’s much-maligned Windows Genuine Advantage program phoning home to verify the authenticity of your operating system’s license code, I find myself agreeing with Daniel that Apple should provide us a way to turn this feature off.

“certainly isn’t as insidious”? Talk about blind faith in believing what a company tells you… Or is it the obvious bigotry that is more blind here? Would it be “OK” if Microsoft said that they too were “verifying the OS files that you have installed are the same versions as the ones provided by Microsoft”? After all, I would expect Apple to be checking for illegal copies as well or better yet for people running OSX on a non-Apple x86 system. If you have legal software there’s no worry… ah well.

Won’t be the first time that the criminal element’s voice had more sway than the populous – look at our own founding fathers :)