One of the best apps to have in the toolkit of the privacy minded, developer Objective Development has just unveiled Little Snitch 3.1, their app that prevents other Mac programs from ‘phoning home’ under certain conditions.
Here’s how Little Snitch works, if you’re not familiar. Basically, with Little Snitch, you set up rules that tells your Mac whether or not to allow individual apps on your system to gain access to your network. What this means is that when an app tries to send data to a server in the background, Little Snitch will tell you… and you can shut it down if you don’t think that network access is inappropriate.
Version 3.1’s cool new feature is called Automatic Profile Switching, and it’s mostly for laptops. Essentially, Little Snitch will detect what network you’re on, and allow you to change settings automatically according to whether or not you join, say, your home network, or your office network.
That’s useful. For example, if you have a MacBook that you bring to work, you could tell it to automatically shut-down Bittorrent traffic when you connect to the office network, but to allow Bittorrent to blaze full stream when you’re at home. Or, if you connect to the Internet through your iPhone at cafes, you could tell LittleSnitch to shut down access to everything besides your email client and web browser to save bandwidth.
Little Snitch is a fairly pricy app at $34.95 for a license, but it’s also an indispensible one. You can buy it here from Objective Development by clicking this link.
Source: Objective Development
