Book Image

The macOS User Administration Guide

By : Herta Nava
Book Image

The macOS User Administration Guide

By: Herta Nava

Overview of this book

Apple is pushing the capabilities of its technologies to help users achieve high performance, including improvements in its OS running across all Mac systems, macOS, and new technologies such as M1 Silicon chips. This book walks you through macOS from a system administration and support point of view, exploring its latest features. The book starts by explaining macOS architecture, installation, and startup processes to enable you to get started with the OS. You'll learn how to manage users and discover techniques for user security and privacy. Moving on, you'll get to grips with the macOS file system and learn to manage disks, volumes, and partitions for effective file management. Most of the examples covered in this book are from an administrator's perspective; however, when relevant, a standard user's perspective is also presented. You'll find illustrations for Mac systems running macOS 11 (Big Sur), and when necessary, for macOS 10.15 (macOS Catalina). Finally, you'll explore advanced topics such as networking and using command-line tools for administration tasks. By the end of this macOS book, you'll be well-versed with macOS features, administration tasks, and best practices. You'll also be able to apply the concepts to increase your chances of success in obtaining Apple certifications such as Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP).
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
18
About Packt

Managing privacy in macOS

In this section, we will look at some macOS tools and options you can use to further enhance user privacy protection on your Mac. This section covers the following topics:

  • Security & Privacy settings
  • Location Services
  • What is cross-site tracking?
  • Dictation service
  • User-approved MDM

Many of these settings are configured in the Security & Privacy preferences (Figure 5.1) in the System Preferences.

Let's explore these services in more detail.

Security and Privacy settings

In the Security & Privacy preferences, you can manage system-wide and personal security and privacy settings.

More specifically, there are four tabs in these preferences (Figure 5.47): General, FileVault, Firewall, and Privacy. Let's examine each of them.

General: You can do the following in this section, apart from changing your user password, which we've already covered. Take into account that, to change the options that are grayed out, you would have to authenticate...