McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005: Upping the Ante for Security Suites Keeping Things Private with the Privacy Service Joseph Moran
Privacy Service
The McAfee's Privacy Service really has two purposes, one of which is to monitor and control access to the Internet – what users can see and when – for all users of the computer.
After installing the Privacy Service, you can create individual access accounts for each user (in addition to the default Administrator account). User accounts can be defined as one of five different age groups — young child, child, young teenager, older teenager, and finally, adult. The age group selected determines the content access that is allowed. You can't view or modify the broad access criteria for the different age groups, but you can add individual allowed or blocked sites within each group. You can also restrict access to the Internet entirely based on time of day.
The user accounts in Privacy Service aren't tied to different user profiles, which is good if multiple people in a household log into the same profile. If multiple profiles are in use, a user will have to log into the operating system and then again into their account in the Privacy Service in order to access the Internet, which can be a hassle. A way around this, at least for one user, is to define one account as the Startup User, which will be automatically signed in when the system first starts. Of note, if no startup user is chosen, Internet access is not possible until someone signs into an account.
One missing feature we'd like to see is a timeout setting so that if a privileged user leaves the computer unattended, the account would sign off and thus make it less likely a younger child could come along and have inappropriate access. But during our use of the program, the Privacy Killer was adept at blocking access to possibly harmful content based on the age group specified. For example, an account defined as belonging to a young child was denied access to AOL Instant Messenger and the Yahoo! home page.
Keeping Things Private
The other function of the Privacy Service is to keep data of a personal nature from being sent to the Internet from your computer, either with or without your knowledge. The idea is to identify bits of sensitive data like your name, address, and various important numbers like phone, SSN, and credit card or bank account numbers. (The information identified as sensitive isn't user specific and is blocked for all users of the system.)
If any of the aforementioned data appears outbound to the Internet, the Privacy Service intercepts and blocks the transfer until confirmation is provided, assuming the administrator is logged on. For users other than the administrator, the sensitive information is replaced with a standard string of characters.
This feature of Privacy Blocker worked well for the most part but was not flawless. Although it blocked specified personal information from being sent in most cases, we were able to sign on to our online banking account unchallenged even though both our user ID and PIN had been flagged as personal.
