Welcome to Little Snitch Mini

Little Snitch Mini is designed to give you insight into the network activity on your Mac, and to block unwanted activity with a single click. Viewing network activity of the last 5 minutes is available for free. Viewing past activity – up to a year and blocking of specific activity — is a premium feature, and requires a paid subscription.

Insight

Network activity on your Mac is mainly caused by processes such as applications like Safari, or by macOS itself, for example when accessing and syncing data with your iCloud account. For simplicity, we will refer to all these processes as “apps”. Apps act on behalf of somebody, as they have no will of their own. For example, when you open a website, an app (your web browser) acts on your behalf. It connects to the server that hosts the requested site, downloads its data and presents it to you.

But not all network activity performed by an app is on your behalf or even for your benefit. Many apps also act on behalf of their publishing companies. They connect to servers to report usage metrics and user behavior, or simply to download ads. And in rare cases, you may even be the victim of malware that tries to steal confidential information such as passwords or credit card numbers.

Without Little Snitch Mini, all this activity happens invisibly, in the background, without you even noticing. Little Snitch Mini hooks into macOS to make this visible: For each app, it records and lists the domains and servers it connects to, and lets you block unwanted connections.

This is what Little Snitch Mini looks like. You can see which app connected to which server in which domain, how much data was transferred, and in which region of the world the server is located.

Control

When you see all the domains and servers an app connects to, it is not always clear why a particular connection was made. In some cases, however, it is quite obvious. For example, if it connects to analytics.google.com, you can be pretty sure that this connection is meant to share metrics about your behavior. You may want to stop this, and with Little Snitch Mini – with premium features enabled – you can. Just click on the green button with the checkmark on the right. Once it turns red, all future connections to analytics.google.com will be blocked. Similarly, you can block connections to entire domains such as ads.com or block entire apps from connecting at all.

Blocklists

Knowing which connection is required for an app to work properly and which is not is not an easy task. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing for sure, although there may be strong evidence, as in the case of analytics.google.com. Fortunately, others have already done a lot of research and compiled lists of servers and domains believed to be collecting analytics, serving ads and much more. These lists are available in Little Snitch Mini in the form of so called blocklists. Servers and domains contained in a blocklist will be blocked for every app, unless you explicitly allow them for a specific app.

There are a variety of blocklists available, each with a different purpose. Some include domains and servers that collect analytics, others list servers that serve ads, and still others focus on servers that serve malware, promote online gambling, or share explicit content. Little Snitch Mini lets you choose from several different blocklists, or you can enter the URL of any other blocklist you want to use (see section Blocklists for supported formats). To make life even easier, blocklists are automatically checked for updates once a day.