Can I turn off icloud keychain internet account syncing

Hello rdegler,

The following article provides instructions for disabling iCloud Keychain.

Can I remove my iCloud Keychain from Apple's servers?

Yes. Follow these steps, starting on any one of your iOS devices or Macs that is using iCloud Keychain:

Devices using iOS 7.0.3 or later:

1. Go to Settings > iCloud > Account > Keychain and turn off “Approve with Security Code”.
2. Go to each of your other devices that is using iCloud Keychain and turn iCloud Keychain off.

Macs using OS X Mavericks v10.9 or later:

1. Choose Apple () menu > System Preferences. Click iCloud, then click Account details.
2. Deselect “Allow approving using security code”.
3. Go to each of your other devices that is using iCloud Keychain and turn iCloud Keychain off.

After you complete these steps, your keychain data will remain locally on your devices, but changes to your keychain information will not push to your other devices or the cloud unless you turn iCloud Keychain back on. If you want keychain data to push to all of your devices, but not to the cloud, turn on iCloud Keychain on each device as described earlier in this document, but skip the step to create an iCloud Security Code.

iCloud: Frequently asked questions about iCloud Keychain

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5813

Cheers,

Allen

Did you find a solution to this problem?

I am having a problem, when using google's two-factor authentication - basically, once a google two-auth internet account is synced to my second computer, it goes offline. If I add a second password on the second computer, it then syncs back to the first, which goes offline. Doesn't really work....

Being able to disable internet account syncing would be more than enough to solve my problem.

jinx.pt, have you tried using the same Google two-factor password on both computers instead of generating a new password for each computer? That way the synced password should be the same.

As for rdegler's original post -- anyone ever find a solution for this? I'm experience the same thing although it's all on the same computer. I user separate user accounts on my laptop for personal, work and school -- when I add an email account to Mail on one user, that same email account automatically gets added to Mail on my other users.

When I attempt to delete the account from the other users I get this message: "Do you want to remove the Google account “abc@def.com” from all your computers using iCloud Keychain or turn it off on only this Mac?" If I decide to "turn it off on only this Mac" it just gets added back as a new account from iCloud, causing duplicates.

It would be great to have a setting in Mail to not automatically add new accounts from iCloud Keychain.

If you do not want your work email account on your personal mobile devices then simply do not set up the account on those devices.

Not quite that simple Michael. If I set up an email account on any device that I'm using iCloud Keychain on, the email account gets added to all other devices I'm using iCloud Keychain on.

Really? I wasn't aware of that behavior. At any rate on an iOS device go into Settings > Mail, Contact, Calendars, select the account and disable what you don't want on the device (i.e. email).

Michael, I appreciate the help but that's another problem I tried to address in my post and it isn't necessarily just about iOS devices, my main problem is different user accounts on the same computer. From my post earlier:

"When I attempt to delete the account from the other users I get this message: "Do you want to remove the Google account “abc@def.com” from all your computers using iCloud Keychain or turn it off on only this Mac?" If I decide to "turn it off on only this Mac" it just gets added back as a new account from iCloud, causing duplicates."

Hm. I've never seen or heard of that behavior before.

Yeah, from what I can tell, it sounds like the same problem that the original poster of this thread was having last year.

Thanks again for trying.

iCloud Keychain syncing is a great feature in Mavericks, but the Internet Accounts settings syncing should really have an option to disable it.

My work Exchange account set up on my company MacBook Pro syncs its account settings to my wife's Mac Mini, so as soon as I set up the Exchange account in OS X Mail, its settings automatically propagate to my wife's Mac Mini's OS X Mail, and as soon as she opens Mail, the Exchange account starts downloading email from my company's Exchange server.

Apple sometimes strikes me as a company that lacks any common sense. This is a major corporate security breach. Corporate computers have encrypted hard drives, but home computers don't have to. So, aside from the fact that it's a major inconvenience and a pain in the rear, it's also a serious breach in corporate security. How is it that Apple didn't put a switch in iCloud Keychain settings to have this feature enabled or disabled?

Like others stated, if I try to remove the Exchange account from my wife's Mac Mini, it automatically removes it from my corporate MacBook Pro. Yes, it's possible to make the Exchange account inactive on the Mac Mini, but that requries extra steps, and doesn't take away the fact that my corporate email account is automatically set up on my wife's private Mac Mini via the iCloud Keychain feature.

Another downside of this feature is that both my corporate MacBook Pro and my wife's Mac Mini inundate the logs with the same message repeating itself every couple minutes that there's an account that is deleted but not among the deleted accounts. So, it seems that there's some sort of old account that was once set up and then removed that is stuck in the iCloud keychain, and even though it's not provisioned on any computers, it's not being removed from the iCloud Keychain syncing function. So, both Macs just get hammered with these messages every other minute.

Just upgraded to Mavericks at work, and all of a sudden now I'm getting work emails at home.

Did you find a solution?

Hi,

I also find this behaviour of iCloud rather forward, but would be able to live with syncing Exchange account automatically, if it would not create random duplicates in Mail accounts as well as Calendar accounts.

Deleting from the involved application prefs does not work, since it forwards one to the Internet Accounts in System Preferences, where only one instance of the account is presented.

Better detection of duplicates is necessary, but I also subscribe to the fact that syncing should be selectable per account.

Gerrit Jan

First of all, this is me just ranting. I haven't found a solution other than disabling the whole thing.

I can't even begin to describe how incredibly annoyed I am by this "feature". I am a software engineer and this has to be the stupidest implementation I have ever seen in my life... And I've seen a lot of dumb ****. Not allowing users to configure their accounts to sync the content they want??? Are you serious Apple??

What in world were they thinking...

Has anybody found a solution to this problem? I am having exactly the same issue. I am also getting old email accounts from my older Macs synced to any new Mac I set up with iCloud!