A report on The Hacker News said OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) sends such data to Apple's remote servers by default, when the user sends queries via the Spotlight desktop search tool.
"The same data Apple collects from the users' searched term on Spotlight will also be forwarded to Microsoft's Bing search engine as Apple freely admits in its terms of service," it said.
But it also noted Apple itself had disclosed this on its "About Spotlight and Privacy" document.
It also said that if Location Services is turned on, search queries to Spotlight will send the location of a user's device at that time to Apple.
But The Hacker News said Apple has advised users who don't want their data collected to turn off Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web searches in System Preferences.
On the other hand, THN said Spotlight does not use a persistent identifier, "so a user's search history can't be created by Apple or anyone else."
It added Apple devices only use a temporary anonymous session ID for a 15-minute period "before the ID is discarded." — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News
source: gmanetwork.com
