Hardening macOS
I like the title and premise of the article, but a list of tips with no description makes this feel like the standard &quot;Tweak Ur Registry&quot; article. I know OP is the author so I&#x27;m not trying to be a jerk, but I think adding details would improve things.<p>To give specific examples, it is totally unclear why the article recommends creating an unprivileged account (the default user account is already unprivileged without entering a password for anything and it is unclear how e.g. su admin -&gt; sudo command is any more secure than sudo command). If someone has local access to the machine and the admin password, you&#x27;re toast whether you are logged in as admin or as an unprivileged user. Is the risk malicious processes? Maybe there is some specific authentication procedure somewhere in MacOS where defaulting to an unprivileged user makes sense, but the site does not describe one.<p>Another example: The article recommends going into Gatekeeper and making it less secure. The default option, I believe, is to only allow App Store programs to launch without complaining. So &quot;only App Store and code signed apps&quot; is actually the more convenient, LESS secure option. I do it immediately because I don&#x27;t want to be stuck with the App Store, which is useless. But turning off a security feature for convenience isn&#x27;t hardening.<p>Later; on second boot, turn off apps that want access to Camera&#x2F;Microphone&#x2F;Full Disk. This seems straightforward enough and worth doing, except the first step in this list was to format your computer and if you&#x27;ve been following the steps thusfar, no apps have access to Camera, Microphone, or Full Disk. If I remember correctly, after installing new applications, they need to do a system API prompt to gain access to those things.<p>And then the back half is mostly about replacing Google stuff with privacy-focused alternatives. Privacy and security aren&#x27;t diametrically opposed, but they aren&#x27;t the same thing either. Also, despite arguing to opt-out of Google things, the earlier &quot;change your DNS&quot; tip recommends using Google DNS. Also, while I use a VPN for certain use cases, recommending installing a commercial VPN places an enormous amount of trust in the VPN provider -- it&#x27;s true that they probably have more incentive than Google to respect your privacy from a logging perspective, but from a security point of view, it would seem it would be way easier to compromise a small VPN provider and try to MITM some of their connections without detection than to do the same to a commercial ISP.<p>So overall I think the article could use a title change to reflect that much of the advice is not MacOS-specific; fleshing out to make clear how some of the changes actually prevent against security threats; and more thought given to whether this is an article about privacy, security, or both, and thus whether readers should be given information about cases when the two might be at odds with each other.<p>(You may have very good answers to all of these things, but adding them to the article would be more useful than replying with them here)