Spyware Programs

Tony —

Thank you very much for your question and your interest in Tech Talk.

The short answer to your question is there are no good anti-spyware programs for the Macintosh, and the reason is that the Macintosh really doesn't need them. OS X is set up to prevent any program installations of any sort without an administrator's password, and your Macintosh must have an administrator's password. Therefore malicious programs such as spyware pretty much don't have a chance to be installed. Here's a more detailed explanation from Mike Waltonen, one of our guests on the spyware show:

"There is virtually no spyware for the Mac. I know of one that is called Opener, and to install it you have to download the program, double click the exe, and then type in your password. It is very hard to get spyware, other than cookies (which are very benign), on a Mac."

I looked for Mac anti-spyware programs and found two. All of the comments about them talked about things like "I can't install the program" or "I can't get the program off of my machine." All of the advertising for them was very sensationalistic. Other software of its kind that has been advertised this way has never worked very well.

Unlike Windows, Macintosh Administrators don't have unchecked authority over the machine. To perform the same kind of tasks, users must first authenticate to gain temporary Root access (aka sudo access). This is exactly how UNIX and Linux work, which is what OS X is built off of. This is not to say that Mac OS is impenetrable, but the behavior to get anything like this on there would probably be termed a virus rather than spyware.

We should have covered this issue on the show, we do try to describe how issues affect both Macintosh and Windows machines, but I'm afraid we missed the ball on this one.

Thanks again for your question!

— The Tech Talk Staff