Upon installing OS X 10.5 a new user is created on the system. A guest user. By default this user doesn’t need a password and the parental controls are turned on. This user is not meant to be used for day to day usage and as Apple says, the home folder is deleted at logout. Thus meaning that the user is always ‘fresh’ when next person come to use it.
One thing that is not mentioned in the documentation, is that the activity logs for this user are not deleted, allowing the administrator of the Mac to monitor activity on this user account. There’s also no explicit way of removing the logs. After doing a bit searching, and not finding results, I thought I should figure out how to remove these logs. All though preferences for the user are kept at
~/Library/Managed Preferences/Guest/
, deleting these wont delete the logs.
To remove them, you need to delete folders and files in:
~/Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls/Guest/
Notice that you need to change file permissions in order to reach that directory and use the secure empty trash to delete them.
–kristian
[update: to clarify, the logs hold information such as applications used and websites visited]
tag: Delete OS X 10.5 Leopard Guest Account Log
if you need to change permissions to delete them (which you can’t do as a guest), as a guest user there is no way to ‘cover your tracks’ so to speak ?
Yeah, you’ll need admin rights to change the permissions and, as far as I know, you can’t delete anything from ~/Library/ as a non-admin user. So, no, you can’t cover your tracks. which I guess is a good thing. It’s just a bit odd that there’s no ‘Clear Logs’ button in the Parental Controls pane.
See the above post on Guest Account Defaults.