TL;DR: Install Lulu and block syspolicyd if you are on macOS Catalina or above, it will improve first-run execution time on unsigned binaries and scripts and also improves privacy

Recommended Reading

Consequences of phone-to-home

  • Apple will have the ability to tie your IP Address to the applications and scripts that you execute on your Mac

  • Consequently, it may be tied to your iCloud account (or some other form of unique identifier) and could potentially lead to documentation of all the software installed on your device

Things required

  • The latest version of Objective See’s Lulu

Steps

  • Install Lulu, perform a reboot and allow Lulu to whitelist Apple applications by default and blacklist everything else (then you will receive a flurry of prompts to whitelist or blacklist applications that you have already installed)

  • Go to the Apple tab and search for syspolicyd and right click on the allow checkmark and click on toggle (block)

  • Now syspolicyd's embedded phone to home will be walled off from the internet (as of macOS Catalina 10.15.5)

Measuring performance

Done using echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh (from the recommended reading) && time /tmp/test.sh with rm /tmp/test.sh between runs

Performance before syspolicyd block

Hello
real    0m0.285s
user    0m0.001s
sys    0m0.002s

Hello
real    0m0.004s
user    0m0.001s
sys    0m0.002s

Performance after syspolicyd block

Hello
real    0m0.004s
user    0m0.001s
sys    0m0.002s

Hello
real    0m0.004s
user    0m0.001s
sys    0m0.002s