Privacy Guard

Learn how to use the Privacy Guard tool in Disk Aid to scan for and remove adware, browser data, cookies, and extensions from your Mac.

Overview

The Privacy Guard tool helps you find and remove files and data that may compromise your privacy. It scans for browser caches, cookies, browsing history, and more, allowing you to clear them all at the click of a button.

Selecting Your User Folder

When you first run Privacy Guard, you are asked to select your User folder.

  1. Click the Select User Folder button.
  2. In the Folder Select window, choose your User folder.
  3. Click Choose in the bottom-right corner.

Running a Scan

  1. Click the Start Scan button to begin scanning.
  2. Wait for the scan to complete.

Reviewing Results

After the scan, you will see a list of categories showing detected items that can be cleaned.

Each category has a Details button so you can see exactly what was found. Use the tick box next to each category to choose whether Privacy Guard should take action on it.

What Privacy Guard Detects

  • Internet Browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) -- Caches, cookies, history, downloads, form data, recent searches, web storage, and last session information.
  • QuickTime Player -- Caches, download quarantine history, and recent items.
  • Finder -- Download quarantine history and recent items.
  • Preview -- Recent items.
  • Mail Downloads -- Downloaded mail attachments.
  • Flash Cookies -- Locally stored Flash objects.

Cleaning Selected Items

  1. Tick the categories you want to clean.
  2. Click the Next button in the bottom-right corner.
  3. If any apps need to be closed before cleaning can proceed, a prompt will list them. Quit those apps by switching to them and pressing Cmd + Q.

  1. Review your selections on the confirmation screen. You can click Back to modify your choices, or click Clean to proceed.
  2. Once cleaning is complete, a results screen shows how much content was removed and how much space was saved.

We always recommend making a Time Machine backup before performing an intensive clean, so you can restore anything you might need later.

Settings

Open preferences by pressing Cmd + , or by choosing Disk Aid > Settings from the menu bar.

Under the Privacy Guard section, you can configure the following:

  • Secure Delete -- Enable this to use a secure deletion process instead of regular deletion.
  • Security Level -- Use the slider to choose between Low, Medium, and High secure deletion levels. Higher security increases cleaning time.