Tags showing up in another user account as aliases

That is quite interesting. You can't search tags with Spotlight, as far as I can tell, but it does search them somehow. I'll try to check it out on my system.

This got me as I was testing: Are those files in a location that is readable by you in her account, like directly in her Home folder.

For me, I could not see files in my Wife's Documents folder, but I could see ones in her home folder since everyone has read privileges to that folder.

Did you deslect the tag, then reselect and it showed up again?

I'm not sure what is going on, other than that.

I don't know what could cause this. I can't replicate it, so I don't know where to go from here.

I can replicate this, and it's why I came here today.

After tagging a few hundred files I was horrified to find that all my used tags were listed in other user-accounts on my system, and that "broken" aliases to the tagged files got listed for users without privilleges to access those files and folders.

I just discovered that if I delete a tag in Finder that is used by an other user, I will no longer find the files using that tag using the tags-list when I log in to the other user-account. The tag is still listed in the sidebar, and Looking at the tagged files themselves, they still have the tag, but the files do not appear when I click the tag in the sidebar.

I guess this just deleted the reference in the spotlight-index, which also explains the shared tag issue and other users file showing up under your tags, as spotlight will happily return results from other accounts with no regard for permissions unless you disable indexing( which means you can't search files by tag).

Don't know why I didn't realize this sooner.

If you use Terminal to run

ls -del

Do you get a line like the following ?

1: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,readattr,readextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit

Migrated users seem to have this added, which may allow spotlight to give results, even though the other users have no access.

I see now that one 'new ' user account has similar, but for a different user, so maybe migration triggers it for both the migrated and account used when doing so.

Unfortunately I didn't get to check this before I decided to try reindexing my drives by adding and removing them to the "privacy" list in Spotlight preferences. That seem to have fixed this issue for me, and there's no wonky access control stuff in the output of "ls -del".

I spoke to soon, as the problem cropped up again the next day. I've also tested a clean install of mavericks with new users, and locked down permissions, and can still replicate this behaviour.

Rolling back to Mountain Lion.