Safari 4's Messy Trail 200
Signum Ignitum writes "Safari 4 comes with a slew of cool new features, but extensive data generation combined with poor cleanup make for a data trail that's a privacy nightmare. Hidden files with screenshots of your history, files that point back to Web pages you've visited and cleared from your history, and thousands of XML files that track the changes in the pages in your Top Sites can add up to gigabytes of information you didn't know was kept about you." Some of Safari's bloat is kept in quite obscure locations; it takes a fairly knowledgeable user to find it and clean it up. You can avoid some of the worst of it by disabling Top Sites.
Advert co-incidence (Score:3, Interesting)
(frosty piss)
Safari does clean up after itself. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a "Empty Cache" button under the "Safari" menu.
Before "Empty Cache"
ahze:/private/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++31gU+-Ev6/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari ahze$ du -sh
129M .
After "Empty Cache"
ahze:/private/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++31gU+-Ev6/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari ahze$ du -sh
32K .
Oh expoitable (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope no one here is naive enough to use the "if you have nothing to hide..." line.
Getting back to the government, most cases are not high profile law&order style procedural deals. I could easily see local lawyers taking porn sites as evidence you killed her, technology sites as evidence you were researching bombs, map sites that you were researching crimes, and I can see local judges allowing it, and local jury's believing it.
Of course they could get most of this from ISP logs, but that would be just that much harder to get, and wouldn't come with screen shots.
Re:Safari does clean up after itself. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been keeping track of mac chrome [manu-j.com] and in the last two months it has become quite stable and only thing missing is flash. Some here would even consider that a feature.
Re:Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:5, Interesting)
But is there really anything to fix besides the files getting into the /var/folders on secure home dir scenarios?
Browsers cache/store history since they were invented and that click happy site found there is a treasure there. Well, that is why Apple spits files to the randomized and soon to be more secure caches dir. The breach (!) requires someone sitting on your chair and browsing your Caches. It is the same formula for getting Mac fanatics attention and unfortunately every time, it works.
What will they do? 128 bit encrypt general public jpegs? Not that it can't be done, just enable filevault or whatever equivalent on Windows.
time.
Re:just poke around in ~/.mozilla/* (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever wonder why Apple, who offers one of the best organized file system to users since 1980s decided to put temp files to ''non obvious'' places, scattering them?
Think a bit. I was a Mozilla user when they made the great choice of randomizing cache/temp folder name, Apple (and some vendors) just extended it to operating system for exact same reasons. Temp folder and caches folder security is one of weak points of operating systems and by putting files to weird, impossible to guess places, they are preventing some targeted attacks in future.
That's What Passwords Are For (Score:3, Interesting)
Fretting about Safari 4 privacy issues seems a bit pointless because if someone can see all that data they can see anything on your Mac.
If your Mac -- or any other PC -- is available to others, well... that's what a password is for.
Re:At least it is not windows temp (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one who changes the temp directories immediately after installation? C:\tmp for both user and windows temporary folder. I clear it frequently. Sometimes, stuff just doesn't WANT to delete, so I start in safe mode, and delete it anyway. No computer has the right to store data that I consider "sensitive". Anime porn, government subversion, or funding for the most outstanding charity in the world, it is MY business, and no one else's. People should learn what the environment variables are for, and use them intelligently - whether they use Mac, Windows, or *nix
Re:At least it is not windows temp (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably one of the best ways I've found to deal with temp stuff (if you have enough ram) is to create a ram drive and throw your web cache, page file, and all temp files on there. At least that way when you reboot, they're all gone.
This method works great with Opera or Firefox, but as far as I know, Safari does not let you change the location of it's cache. In Opera, just type opera:config and then search for cache, in firefox, just type about:config and then it's a matter of adding a string to the config (google if you would like to know more).
Aside from keeping pesky temp files from building up, this also helps to cut down on disk fragmentation because many of your most modified files will now be isolated on a ram disk and ram doesn't really have any loss compared to a hard disk for fragmentation.
Re:Oh expoitable (Score:1, Interesting)
For anyone that doesn't believe this, Michael Peterson [wikipedia.org] was convicted of murder on questionable evidence, after the jury was allowed to hear evidence of gay porn on his computer.
It should have nothing to do with the case, but many locals believe it's relevant and because no one else does this (to their knowledge) it's evidence of evil.
What would they find in your cache?
Re:Oh expoitable (Score:3, Interesting)
I just checked that out on my Mac. While there certainly is a long list of sites (longer than I'd like to see, for sure) listed there, it includes any site that happened to have a Flash ad on a page that I've loaded so it's not really an accurate record of where I've been.
Still, I agree that it's a bothersome thing
Re:Ads Disabled box? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi.
Where is this box? I'm fairly active, but I don't have it/can't find it.