Anyone with the password would have access whether the device is logged into an Apple Account or not. Or not? I am not getting the connection they are asserting that being logged in to an AA provides more protection for your data…
If you have the password to the account, you have access. I’m no longer sure what you’re asking. They’re just reminding you that someone with the password can get access.
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Thanks for that @ddmiller , I think they show in the dialog that ‘Find My/Activation Lock’ will be ‘removed’. To me, those are features, not data, so it should read ‘deactivated’ or ‘turned off’ etc.
Still, I haven’t paid much attention to what Activation Lock is so thanks for noting it, I’ll need to research it a bit more.
I suppose users need an Apple Account to even set up an Apple Device any more, but being logged into it only provides some benefits afaik. I have been logged out of it on Mac and iPad for a couple of days and haven’t noticed any difference. The Mac was not being found by Find My anyway and I tried a bunch of troubleshooting for several hours without success.
Yes that’s always the case, whether a user is logged in to their Apple Account or not. So I am not sure what they are warning about in the context of logging out of the AA. I think they are just trying to scare and confuse people and keep them from logging out. They must be making money or gathering some valuable data or something from devices that are logged in to AAs, otherwise why all this confusing and irrelevant text?
I believe that the message in “Sign Out But Don’t Erase” is talking about the passcode to the device, not the Apple Account. What that warning message is saying is that if you log out of your Apple Account and leave the data behind on the device, anyone else with access to the device who knows the passcode will see the private data that was stored in or synced with iCloud (the examples that they give are Health data, Passwords, contacts, photos, documents, apps data, bookmarks, and passes in Apple Wallet) if you do not remove it when you log out of the account.
If you intend to log back in later, the sync process with iCloud will go much faster, as only data that has changed since the log out will need to be synced up or down to iCloud. If you do not intend to log in later, and instead will log in to a different account (or pass the device on to someone else), you almost surely want to delete all of the synced data.
I am 100% sure that you are wrong and perhaps overly cynical.
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I think they’re making sure people know what the situation is. People don’t necessarily remember things in the moment.
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This may well be more than you want to know (and certainly extends way beyond iCloud) but here is a status board for all the internet Apple System Services. You may want to reduce your internet footprints but there are a lot of footprints even when you aren’t logged-in to iCloud.
Dave
I find the idea of using any of my Apple devices not signed in to my iCloud anccount absolutely inconceivable.
I started to analyse why this is and realise that for me it is 90% about synchronisation. I can see that if I only had one device I could understand your statement. Having all my:-
Documents,
Mail,
Contacts,
Calendars,
Bookmarks,
Notes,
Books,
Photos and movies (plus sharing abilty)
Freeforms,
Passwords
Data from apps which use iCloud, like all our financial accounts
…. consistent across my three macs, iPad, iPhone and watch is of immense value.
The other 10% benefit is about media (music, movies) I buy, very little, and apps from the App Store..
So I can understand that if you only have a Mac and iPad, and and you only use the iPad for content consumption, you would not see much difference for being signed in. Twenty years ago I would probably have said the same.
PS “Find my’ is another very important benefit for me and should work for your Mac and iPad.
@ddmiller thanks for the careful analysis.
As the OP who provided the screen shots, I am 100% right that this message comes from signing out of the Apple Account.
This is why I don’t understand the scare tactic. I admit to being a very minimal user of iCloud and not being up to date on the use of Apple Account so maybe that’s why Apple’s text is confusing. I was not aware of Apple Account login providing more protection of user data.
Maybe I can ask it clearer: how does being logged in to AA protect data from access by someone who has the passcode?
Overly cynical could be right, I might need to recalibrate…
I agree it’s good of Apple to remind users before taking tricky steps, but they have the documentation talent and experience to make it clearer, but don’t.
Thanks for the link, I hadn’t been there in a while thanks to the services I use being very reliable.
If I counted right there are 79 services listed! Of which a few I have not heard of and maybe 10 I use regularly. Weirdly enough, I am viewing TBT in a Web App and it got stuck on that page, wouldn’t go back so I quit and relaunched.
Maybe I missed some more memos but I was thinking iCloud and AA are different aspects of our Devices’ relationship with Apple. Sharing same login could have clued me in I suppose 
. But I’m going to have to dig in to that some more. Maybe something happened when it was changed from Apple ‘ID’ to ‘Account’. Back then iirc I just thought it was more or less a name change, now it seems to be more of a leash on users. Yikes, I need to get with the program. No doubt Mr. Engst has an article here on the change back then that I should review.
My Mac for the last day or two logged out of AA and just checked iCloud and am also logged out of it, yet on my Mac, Apple Mail is still coming and going, third party Apps still launching, but iMessages is not working, which kind of makes sense although why Mail can work and iMessages not is a bit baffling, as I thought they were both functions of iCloud.
Gads, I guess I’ll shut up now and do my research instead of taxing TBT with Topics!
I agree that the screenshot in your opening post is about signing out of iCloud, not about passcode. You don’t “sign out of passcode”.
There maybe some deeper answers to your question, but I don’t think being signed into iCloud account protects data from someone who has the passcode. All iCloud data on an iPad that is signed in to iCloud is accessible to someone who has the passcode. This is not the main reason for signing in.
However, if you signed out of iCloud after every use then the iCloud data would not be available to someone with the passcode, but this would be totally impractical, at least for me, as signing out of iCloud is a big step and signing in again and waiting for everything to fully sync can take a long time. I only sign out as trouble shooting last resort.
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to make it clearer
The message is perfectly clear, it’s just a bit scary.
That’s right. Haven’t you gotten the memo to sleep with the pods?
Look at it from Apple’s point of view: we’re giving you all these wonderful, cloud-based capabilities for almost nothing (as long as you don’t rent too much cloud storage), and the ability save all sorts of things to the cloud and, and…. And every one of them a potential source of additional income, when you want more of {available cloud capability}.
To be fair, I’m pretty happy with my minimal usage of iCloud, but I realize YMMV, considerably. (Though I was not happy last week when my iOS devices happily updated my iWork ads to version 15 [complete with disgusting icons], but on my Mac, my Apple Account password (last changed last summer) was required, but did not work. I even had it stored in two, separate, secure places. The next day, it suddenly did work.)
Now (6:45 PM EST), Find My has been down for some hours, and Apple is reporting issues with just about anything iCloud, for some users. Enormous botnets for DDoS are getting really cheap these days.
It’s too late in the evening for me to renew intimate acquaintance with this Apple’y iCloud’y stuff but here I may help a bit. Apple Mail is a “generic” email client, it just knows IMAP and POP and whatever those Microsoft dudes are doing. So, when you run it and it checks your mail there is no interaction at all with iCloud services it’s just checking your mail. If you have a joeschmoe@icloud.com address it’s just interacting via the IMAP protocol. Messages, on the other hand, has gone through metamorphoses over the decades but is now thoroughly tied to your Apple Account (not just “iCloud”) because of how it encrypts conversations, how people can message you just with your email address (that the servers magically realize from your account that the message should go to your phone) and so on.
I have never logged out of iCloud on my devices nor have I suggested my clients do so. It’s just too useful to have the synchronisation between workstation and laptop and iPhone and iPad. It has its confounding moments but it’s just too useful. You can go into iCloud Settings and turn off those things you don’t care about. If you have an old workstation, running an older system, that is really vital like the very expensive Windows-based RIPs for fancy printers we had, well, you blocked them from having any conversations. No updates, just keep doing what yer doin’. But if you have friends and acquaintances below the age of 40 you might want to be sure Messages is running properly on all your systems. 
Dave
Righto. It appears that signing out of iCloud is more or less the same as signing out of an AA.
Righto, so hence my confusion about why Apple is scaring users with this warning.
for me signing out is no big deal. I am writing this on a Mac that is signed out of AA for about two days now. But I use iCloud very little. YMMV.
The message might be clear for those who use iCloud a lot and are familiar with its intricacies. I find it confusing. I gave up on iCloud long ago when syncing messed up my files and it got too overlapping and confusing about where my data is. Apple’s intent is clear, and it’s not for me. I find it sad that they have devolved to writing things in a scary way to keep people connected. Ah, well, times change.
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Or a large chunk of support calls were coming from people who couldn’t figure out how to erase their iPads when selling/giving them away and this is a response to it. It really doesn’t read to me as an effort to keep people logged in.
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I agree, if a user uses this stuff, and that it works reliably. I tried it years ago and lost data and had to fix things and just gave up on it. Now it is way to complex and interconnected to do anything but be ‘always on’, else get off the wagon and walk, which is what I’m doing. I don’t like being tethered to internet and having Apple watching all my connections and managing my data.
For me, having devices that are independent, locally back-uppable and free from corporate tether is important. I’ll proceed further with making my devices as independent as possible. Sorry to have bothered the Forum with this.
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Wow! I do it routinely, esp on iPads. I agree it would be useful but in my personal experience the syncing of data was unreliable and rather than repeatedly mess things up and have to fix them, I use very little of what’s offered.
Do you happen to know what’s the difference between logging in to iCloud an AA? are they functionally the same and cannot do one without the other?
I think I have one friend under 40 and we communicate with Signal, which works whether I’m logged in to AA/iCloud or not. Family members below that age seem to use other channels of communication, as they don’t reply to email or iMessages and are apparently not on Signal.
Oh well.