Privatize Your Personal Data

It’s useful to know, as a Mountain Lion user, what private data specific applications are accessing, and how to set/reset that. This can be achieved in the Security & Privacy preference pane within System Preferences, but changes can also be made within Terminal.

Using the tccutil command, the user can reset all access to different segments of the privacy database, such as Address Book or Location Services. This is helpful if you are comfortable in Terminal, and need to quickly remove all application’s access to this data. The command is simple.

Open a Terminal window, and type:

tccutil reset [service name]

You will replace [service name] with the name that Terminal associates with the specific privacy data. For Address Book, the service name is simply AddressBook, and for Location Services, it’s CoreLocationAgent.

Then input:

tccutil reset AddressBook

It will remove all access any applications currently have to your Address Book. From there, when you open an application that would like access to the Address Book, it will prompt you for permission. The same goes for Location Services.

If you are not comfortable with using Terminal, the same task can be accomplished within the Security & Privacy preference pane (with a much prettier interface).