Linux and its various flavors (together called *nix) are growing in mainstream popularity and many enterprise infrastructures now are based on *nix platforms. An important component of these systems is the ingrained multi-user support that lets users share data with each other.In this paper, we first analyze *nix systems and identify an urgent need for better privacy support in their data sharing mechanisms. In one of our studies it was possible to access over 84 GB of private data at one organization of 836 users, including over 300,000 emails and 579 passwords to financial and other private services websites. The most surprising aspect was the extremely low level of sophistication of the attack. The attack uses no technical vulnerabilities, rather inadequacies of *nix access control combined with user/application's privacy-indifferent behavior.We present two solutions to address this problem: (1) an administrative auditing tool which can alert administrators and users when their private data is at risk, and (2) a new View Based Access Control (VBAC) model which provides stronger and yet convenient privacy support. We also describe a filesystem based implementation and performance analysis of VBAC. A unique property of our implementation is that individual users can choose to switch on/off the VBAC access control model. Our evaluations with three well-known filesystem benchmarks show very little overhead of using VBAC. For example, our implementation resulted in only 3% total overhead with the popular Andrew Benchmark.