Comment by ryandrake

Wouldn't someone's expectation instead depend on the nature of the application, and what data it needs? My expectation is that an application does not access the network unless it requires a resource only available from the network. I would totally expect a "Yelp" application to make network requests as part of its core functionality. Yelp is an online service, and in order to use it, you have to talk to the network, and you're generally requesting data that might often change, so you need fresh copies. Same for an Internet browser, or ftp or git (for remotes) or things like that. I would not expect a spell checker to need to access a network because it can all be done locally and the spelling of words doesn't change often enough to need a fresh dictionary from the network over and over. And I certainly would not expect the software to send data to the network. I would also not expect a calculator application to request math function from the network or send my equations to a network service so that the network service could provide a result.