Preventing File Copying

[bobdard]

Hello everyone,

I have a question that I'm not sure belongs here, or perhaps in the applications section. Anyhow, I have a bunch of highly confidential business files, to which I need to provide one of the staff in my office access. I do trust the person, otherwise I wouldn't think about providing them access in the first place, but as a security measure, are any of the following possible?

- Preventing the possibility of being able to copy and paste the file from Finder into a USB key. I need the file to be readable and writable, but would like to make sure it does not leave my computer.

- Logging a user's activity. I've looked into parental controls, and I've looked into the Console, but one is too limited (sites only) and Console is too complicated. I want to have a quick overview of what's going on. Simply put, I probably will never look at this log, unless that staff member leaves the company.

Any possible solutions within OS X or available as third-party software to help me?

Thank you for reading, and any possible advice.

 

[r.j.s]

The way I understand it, if they can read it, they can copy it.

You might be able to disable USB drives, if that is an option.

 

[miles01110]

You can't prevent file copying if you also want it to be readable. I tried searching for the other topic I remember offhand that asked more or less this same question, but I can't find it

 

[old-wiz]

Usually in *NIX, if you can read a file you can copy it.

However, remember that DVDs can't really be copied successfully since they have the DRM wrapper on it. With am idea like this you could write code to do a bit of encryption so that the file could only be read by the program that encrypted/decrypted, but it would be messy and still open to a hack of one kind or another.

Back in the old days, program disks had intentional bad sectors and such that prevented the disk from being copied.