Is Spotlight spying on you?

I'm not sure what the Mac Observer's John Kheit has on his hard drives, and I am not sure I want to know. He seems a little too worried about the metadata that built in OS search tools like Spotlight, or its Windows counterpart, are storing as a matter of course.

All kidding aside, the fact that many more files are now storing metadata is something every computer user should be aware of to avoid many issues. Give John's column a read and then become paranoid about what your files know about you.

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Source: http://www.macobserver.com/columns/devilsadvocate/2005/20051…

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Analysis / Opinion OS Software

I'm not sure what the Mac Observer's John Kheit has on his hard drives, and I am not sure I want to know. He seems a little too...

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Alex Kadis

There's an easy way to hide those "special" folders. Add a '.noindex' file extension to the end. Spotlight will, well, not-index it.

December 29 2005 at 12:02 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jimmie

This is kinda funny, because when me and my Apple friends went to the Tiger debut at the Apple store the day it was released so many Apple reps talked about this very thing with spotlight. They stressed that it will find everything on your Mac, and made sure to show how to use the spotlight preferences in system preferences to turn off "certain" folders you don't want spotlight to look in, to which people laughed. We all knew what they were talking about, porn on computers is a reality to most,lol. I thought it was great on Apple's part to really stress this at the launch, and also I've seen Apple reps stress it in the classes they give at the Apple store.

December 28 2005 at 8:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply