While you use the Internet with lots of programs – your web browser, e-mail program and chat client – you may have other programs that access the Internet for various reasons. The most common is to check for updates; you’ll have lots of programs that do this automatically every day, or every week. You can usually choose whether these programs check for updates, and at what frequency.
But other programs may also phone home, for a variety of reasons. They may send their developers data about who’s using their software. Or, if you happen to have installed any malicious software that may want to send more information to a remote server, this could happen as well. And there’s no way to know when programs are doing this; at least not through Mac OS X.
Intego NetBarrier, however, has an Anti-Spyware feature that allows you to block network access for applications you have added to a list, or to get alerts whenever an application tries to access the Internet. You can set NetBarrier to alert you whenever a program tries to phone home, and you can then choose to allow it or to block it. Once you allow or block an application, it gets added to a list so you can see all the programs that access the Internet. You also see the port numbers they attempt to access; you can block specific ports and allow others, if you wish.
With this feature, you can be sure that the only applications that use the Internet are the ones you allow. And NetBarrier can alert you whenever any other programs try to phone home.
