Tags showing up in another user account as aliases

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Tags showing up in another user account as aliases

We have two user accounts on my 2007 iMac running Mavericks, one for me and the other for my wife.

I have gone through tagging a lot of my own personal files/folders that are in the "Documents" folder in my account, for example "Money" tag. When my wife signs into her account, and she tags her own files with "Money", she clicks on the tag "Money" in her finder under her account, and all of my own files show up here! Though not accessible, but as aliases - because if you try and open them it'll tell you to fix or delete the aliase due to a "broken link/file".

Is anyone else having this issue? Surely this is a serious issue with privacy. Not that my wife and I hide anything from each other, but this surely is not what a lot of people will be wanting. Please fix this!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 5:57 PM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,506 points

Oct 24, 2013 6:10 PM in response to cabe83

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.

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Answer 2

cabe83 Author

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Oct 24, 2013 6:18 PM in response to cabe83

Here is a screenshot I took from my wife's account so you can see what I mean. The file with the big green tick is her file that she's tagged, the rest are mine - it's got the green tick because we have a Synology NAS with CloudStation running (like Dropbox) and all of our files in our own Documents folder are sync/linked to our own accounts on the NAS (not the same accounts).

And as mentioned in my first post, it shows my files under her finder/account as an alias. Very odd.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,506 points

Oct 24, 2013 7:46 PM in response to cabe83

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.

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Answer 4

cabe83 Author

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Oct 24, 2013 8:01 PM in response to Barney-15E

Good question, so I had a look and they are not. The location is "Macintosh HD" -> "Users" -> "caleb" -> "Documents". The permissions for this folder is:

- caleb = "Read & Write"

- everyone = "No Access"

That being said, the "Proof of Purchase" subfolder in my "Documents" has the user everyone as "Read & Write".

So I then went to the root of "Documents" folder's info panel and applied the above two permissions to all sub folders, which I confirmed removed the everyone from "Read & Write" for the "Proof of Purchase" folder to "No Access". I then switched over to my wife's account and checked, and it's still showing the files exactly as before...

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Answer 5

Barney-15E

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Oct 24, 2013 8:06 PM in response to cabe83

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

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

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Answer 6

cabe83 Author

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Oct 24, 2013 8:11 PM in response to Barney-15E

I have tried this, and I confirm that if I remove the "Money" tag from my "Proof of Purchase" (focusing on this folder for these examples), and switch over to my wife's account, the folder is no longer visable in her Finder window when she clicks on the "Money" tag.

So I then re-add the "Money" tag after switching back to my account, then switched back again to my wife's account, and it shows up again. Here is screen show of the folder's permissions to prove it's got "No Access" for everyone.

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Answer 7

Barney-15E

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112,506 points

Oct 24, 2013 8:29 PM in response to cabe83

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

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Answer 8

cabe83 Author

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Oct 24, 2013 10:39 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks Barney-15E for trying anyway. Hope I'm not the only person having this issue.

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Answer 9

Oct 25, 2013 3:58 PM in response to cabe83

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.

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Answer 10

cabe83 Author

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Oct 27, 2013 1:40 AM in response to Tenthumbs

I haven't been able to find a cause/fix for this yet. If anyone does please post it here. Thanks tenthumbs for your post, now I know I'm not alone in this.

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Answer 11

Oct 29, 2013 11:12 AM in response to cabe83

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.

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Answer 12

Oct 29, 2013 12:24 PM in response to Tenthumbs

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.

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Answer 13

andyBall_uk

Level 7

20,516 points

Oct 29, 2013 1:19 PM in response to Tenthumbs

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.

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Answer 14

Oct 29, 2013 1:51 PM in response to andyBall_uk

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".

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Answer 15

Nov 5, 2013 10:07 PM in response to Tenthumbs

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.

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