What can make you more aware of apple's practices is to enable Little Snitch.
It's not perfect, but it monitors what process on your system wants to make what network connection.
What appalled me was that even when adding a LOCAL email account, accountsd tries to phone home to apple. Apple is phoning home in ways it never should.
Though for that specific feature, Apple operates a lookup service that Mail uses to attempt to automatically configure your SMTP and IMAP/POP settings. It would be nice if it asked permission first.
It's not perfect, but it monitors what process on your system wants to make what network connection.
What appalled me was that even when adding a LOCAL email account, accountsd tries to phone home to apple. Apple is phoning home in ways it never should.