Little Snitch

dave28c (apparently) - 02:18pm Apr 16, 2007 PST
via email - Dave Clark

> There are software products like "Little Snitch" which watch network
> traffic and let you know if an application "phones home" and sending
> information you may not want to share. Little Snitch is available
> from

> <http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>.

I've looked at Little Snitch and, indeed, it does warn the user if
one of your programs is trying to "phone home." But, it says nothing
about the purpose of the call, what info the program is sending/
receiving, or anything other than the fact of the phone home effort.
Thus, I concluded that it is basically useless, especially on this Mac.

This is where my trust of Apple comes in. As far as I know, the only
programs on this machine -- a MacBookPro Intel, are ones Apple put
here and ones I installed myself deliberately. So, no spyware
programs have been installed to send my private data home, unless
Apple or Microsoft (Office 2004 for Mac) or Adobe (Photoshop
Elements, Reader) or Intuit (Quickbooks Pro) and a few other well
known companies are now doing that.

Even though the trial period for Little Snitch expired some time ago,
it still pops up if one of my programs is trying to phone home. If
I'm really curious why Mozilla/Firefox (for example) wants to do
that, I can always go to their website and find out. But I'm too
lazy to do that, so I just let them make the phone call.

I'm sure all of these programs are trying to keep track of my
demographics and usage profiles for marketing purposes, but lots of
commercial companies do just that and it doesn't really bother me.

David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name