Safari Is Fat Hog That Spies on You — Porn Mode Doesn’t Work

By Leander Kahney (9:32 am, May. 24, 2009)

top_sites

Apple’s Safari 4 browser is a pig. It’s a resource hog that doesn’t clean up after itself — and it remembers every site you visit, even in “porn mode.”

Safari records every site you visit, even if you turn on the “Private Browsing” feature or clear the browser history. And the files it generates can consume gigabytes of disk space.

“This is a huge privacy concern,” writes designer and musician C. Harwick, from Chapel Hill, NC, who did some snooping in Safari’s hidden system folders. “With no good way of getting rid of them except manually (clearing the history doesn’t do it, and I don’t think resetting Safari does either), these hidden files are strewn all over the user’s hard drive unbeknownst to him waiting for snooping relatives (or more pertinently, law enforcement) to dig them up. I really like Safari, but I’m going to have to seriously consider using Firefox now (ack).”

Harwick discovered that the browser — which is in beta — appeared to remember every site he visited in the History folder, regardless of what he put in preferences. In a few months, this folder had grown to 100MB. Likewise, the Top Sites folder had also grown to about 100MB, and appeared to have remember all the sites he visited since he started using the software.

But the worst offender was the Quicklook folder, a Finder feature that gives a sneak peek of unopened files. Safari’s Quicklook folder included thumbnails of all the sites Hardwick had ever visited with the browser — and had grown to a whopping 2GB.

“Safari does not delete the webpage previews it generates for Quicklook. Ever. 2.03 GB of webpage previews (2 per website – a full resolution and a thumbnail), all generated since downloading the Safari 4 beta — hidden away in an obscure folder,” Harwick wrote.

According to MacOSXTips.com, to disable the “Top Sites” feature, fire up Terminal, and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool FALSE

Via Slashdot.

Posted by Leander Kahney in Apple, News, Software, Top stories | Comment on this article

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About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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27 comments

    this is a beta so I expect some odd things. you can bet that apple has folks trolling the various sites and blogs to see what those using the program have said and some of those things will disappear in the final version.

    until then, I ask this question. this is different from other browsers how. cause i’ve heard the same ‘fat snooping pig’ type comments about IE for example

    Lucas, on May 24th, 2009 at 9:54 am

    There are two things I notices about this:

    1. This is BETA software. There could be problems that need to be fixed.
    2. There is not comment from Apple in this.

    At the risk of coming off like an Apple fanboy, I tend to favor taking the approach of saying “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.” Until either the gold version of Safari is released or Apple says, “this is what we expect,” I favor the approach of assuming this is a bug.

    Discovering bugs…isn’t that the purpose of beta software?

    Charles Barilleaux, on May 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am

    Absolute crap. I turned on Private browsing, visited a site and couldn’t find it in History afterwards.

    p.s. its a Beta browser, submit a bug report, get it fixed. Easy.

    p.s. you should note that Safari 4 is a BETA browser in the title as it’s misleading.

    Steve, on May 24th, 2009 at 10:31 am

    Yeah, i noticed this a while ago, using grand perspective to see where all my disk space was going – Now I just go through to delete it every now and then – one of those “O, i thought it was just me that got annoyed by that, but I’m glad that other people notice it too” bugs.

    Matthew Kerr, on May 24th, 2009 at 10:41 am

    The sites that I visited in Safe Browsing mode are definitely not in any of these folders. No screenshots, no records that I could find. Screenshots were not taken of the secure HTTP sites (like my online banking) either.

    I don’t want to clear my history, so I can’t vouch for that. Considerable disk space is definitely being used (my screenshots folder was almost 5 GB) but considering I knew there was a screenshot for every page I’ve been to since downloading the software, what should I have expected?

    Although they should definitely be stored in ~/Library.

    Privacy and disk space are pretty important to me, but if it were essential (say, if I were running a kiddie porn ring) I would NOT be using beta software. That’s just foolish. Hopefully Apple will address these issues before the software is distributed to its users.

    Michael, on May 24th, 2009 at 10:42 am

    [...] Fuente ¿Valorarías esta nota?  Loading … Compártelo Imprimir Tags: Safari « Video – The Sims 3 para iPhone Inicio [...]

    El modo porno de Safari 4 no funciona | Applediario, on May 24th, 2009 at 11:07 am

    This is most definitely a bug and not a common issue. I just checked my personal ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari folders and they’re clean as a whistle.

    Not the best investigative reporting.

    thelottery, on May 24th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    In fairness, it’s still a Beta.

    Which also makes your headline both a bit inflammatory and misleading.

    Darcy McGee, on May 24th, 2009 at 11:49 am

    Safari is a piece of shit. I can’t wait for Chrome for OS X.

    Matt, on May 24th, 2009 at 11:56 am

    I guess you didn’t notice that Safari 3 is also a resource hog. Especially on PPC systems. Safari is becoming another IE.

    Best to go with Firefox and Camino.

    MacRat, on May 24th, 2009 at 12:11 pm

    Agree with thelottery – as I clear history it’s gone from my metadata, I don’t see any indication of detritus laying about on my drive. Could the author or someone please post steps so that it can be reproduced and verified?

    perkiset, on May 24th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

    Come on COM, it’s a beta build. Get your expectations in order…

    midbach, on May 24th, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    Sure it’s annoying, sure I have just freed up 2 gigs of space on my drive and yes Safari gets slightly slower for me each day. I have thus moved to stainless.

    That’s a pretty big list of defects isn’t it? Well that’s because it’s a beta and this is the sort of problem that I expect from beta software, I even expect the occasional glitch in 1.0 versions of software too.

    Please stop with the inflammatory headlines.

    Teifion, on May 24th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

    The results aren’t true for my MacBook:

    1) Safari 4 is set to clear history every week. The webpage preview folder was only ~220MB.

    2) There are no recorded images for “porn-mode” websites.

    3) Clearing the history and cache in Safari cleared out the entire folder.

    So don’t get paranoid!

    SenatorK, on May 24th, 2009 at 6:49 pm

    > Especially on PPC systems.

    Do those still exist? The last ones came off the assembly line some…4 or 5 years ago? Soon they will all be officially on the obsolete list.

    Irrelevant.

    Darcy McGee, on May 24th, 2009 at 8:11 pm

    One should notice the last line of Harwick’s article.

    “Update: It seems this is indeed a bug and not a feature, possibly confined only to Leopard systems as Tiger users’ histories seem to clear when they’re set to. Hopefully this will be fixed in the final Safari 4.”

    (Harwick doesn’t indicate when the update was provided, but I’ll use the principle of charity and assume it was not posted on Harwick’s site prior to Kahney’s publishing this.)

    Paul F, on May 24th, 2009 at 8:48 pm

    I think this might be the final straw. I’ve noticed that Safari is a resource hog, but I didn’t know that it saved all your history for so long, nor did I know that I needed to delete it. I deleted it and gained a gigabyte of HD space. I don’t know why I didn’t know that. I never clear my history. Ug.

    I’ve always loved that my Mac is “maintenance free.” Now I have maintenance. I think I might switch to Camino or Firefox for good. I always switch when they update because it always seems like the updates are a train wreck for a while.

    *Sigh*

    Scabby, on May 24th, 2009 at 9:03 pm

    “Safari is a piece of shit. I can’t wait for Chrome for OS X.”

    Another well informed and detailed bit of reasoning….

    Helius, on May 25th, 2009 at 1:37 am

    [...] über ein Produkt aus Cupertino herzieht. Doch in diesem Fall ist es geschehen: Cult of Mac meckert den neuen Safari 4 in den Boden. Den Stein brachte C. Harwick ins Rollen, ein Designer, der es [...]

    Heiße Spuren: Safari 4 kennt keinen Porno-Modus | Basic Thinking Blog, on May 25th, 2009 at 2:54 am

    [...] Cult of Mac — [...]

    Неприятный баг Ã, on May 25th, 2009 at 5:50 am

    This article is nonsense. I’m running Safari 4 beta with leopard 10.5.7. I opened my safari history folder and watched it empty before my eyes. Stop posting articles like this as if they were a universal problem rather than a problem confined to one machine. Go test it out on a few different systems first before you cry wolf.

    gimpymw, on May 25th, 2009 at 7:14 am

    >> Especially on PPC systems.

    >Do those still exist? The last ones came off the assembly line some…4 or 5 years ago? Soon they will all be officially on the obsolete list.

    >Irrelevant.

    That’s the beauty of Macs. When others are on their fifth or sixth PC laptop since 2002, I’m still plugging away on my 600Mhz G3 iBook, doing daily work, while my upgraded G4 at home does video conversion and my Cube crunches folding@home and seti@home data.

    Not all of us feel the need to blow thousands of dollars on the newest kit. As nice as it would be to have, my needs don’t call for it at this point in time.

    (Then there’s that little building wealth thing. Read “Millionaire Next Door”…)

    BDDC, on May 25th, 2009 at 8:45 am

    use Opera…

    stanley, on May 25th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    It’s BETA software. Submit a bug report and move on… seriously. By complaining on your blog without submitting a report you are doing absolutely nothing to help the issue.

    uberamd, on May 26th, 2009 at 5:07 am

    http://deathcabforrudie.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-impressions.html

    Rudie Obias, on May 27th, 2009 at 5:02 am

    uhhh, yeah. my previews folder was 2mb. then again, I occasionally clean out safari with IceClean.

    http://www.we-rate-stuff.com/2008/10/iceclean-mac-only.html

    brad, on May 27th, 2009 at 8:36 am

    $100 says that “C. Harwick” is an alias for Chris Hardwick from AOTS

    mat, on May 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am