Apple Developer News, in a post titled âUpdates to Full Disk Access in macoSâ:
We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities
into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls
designed to protect usersâ private data. Full Disk Access largely
sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function
properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in
ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their
systemsâââincluding files, mail, messages, and even browsing
historyâââwithout usersâ full knowledge and understanding. For
communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the
people users are communicating with.
Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure
that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary
level of access can only do so with very explicit user action.
Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly
capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of
access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users
clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so
they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
They donât name names or even mention âagentic AIâ, but clearly this is in response to Meta Muse (cf. Jason Atenâs misadventure with Muse accessing Atenâs iMessages), Grok Bot, Claude, Dots, and the rest.
I really worry about just how much Apple is going to lock Full Disk Access down. I use it with several apps that couldnât function properly without it, and would be severely hampered if I needed to authorize it manually every time they do something.
But before we Mac power users riot in Cupertino, we should note that we have no idea how many non-sophisticated Mac users are calling Apple and queuing up at the retail store Genius Bars to complain about Muse and these other agents having run amok on the Macs, against their desires, after convincing these users to grant them access. It is a legitimate frustration for the highest-functioning users among us that the Mac has, for years, already seemed âtoo locked downâ. But there are now around 150 million Mac users worldwide. Most of them are unsophisticated technicallyâââa majority of them, profoundly so. Many of them have technical needs that cannot be met by the baby computer OS that is iPadOS. So there are tens of millions of people who need to use a Mac to do things that cannot be done on an iPad, but who have zero understanding of what it means, say, to grant Muse permission for Full Disk Access. And then they think it is Appleâs fault that Muse is suddenly able to read their private iMessage conversations.
On iOS (and its tablet variant, iPadOS), you can say OK to every single thing an app like Muse asks for and Muse still wonât be able to read your email or end-to-end encrypted messages from iMessage or WhatsApp. There is no level of permission that grants third-party apps permission for such things. (The EU wants to force Apple to allow that under the DMA.) MacOS isnât like that. You still need to grant apps permission for such things, but if you say OK to everything an app like Muse asks for on the Mac, youâre granting that app access to, effectively, almost everything on your startup drive. There are still some things it canât see, but not many. A lot of non-technical Mac users do not understand this and cannot be expected to understand this. They just think, wrongly, that Apple protects them from allowing anything truly dangerous, because thatâs how their iPhone (and/or iPad) works. So they just click OK to every access request from Muse and presume theyâre still largely protected.
Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do notâââand donât realize theyâre using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.
Link: developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw