Take Control of Securing Your Mac, 3rd Edition

Keep Personal Data Private

As we’ve seen, security and privacy have a complex relationship, but improving your Mac’s security can often increase your privacy—and in fact, keeping your data private is one of the most important reasons to take security measures. Some of the steps that lead to greater privacy don’t involve security in the strictest sense, but they’re no less important just because they fall on one side of that conceptual line. This chapter explores a grab bag that contains four of those topics.

First, I look at the implications of sharing a Mac with other people who each have an individual login account. To what extent do separate accounts keep each person’s data safe, and how do file ownership and permission settings affect your ...