Last month, Apple announced it’d be tightening privacy controls in a future macOS update, in response to AI agents requesting Full Disk Access then going rogue with users data without them being fully aware. Now, we have an idea of how the changes might look.
In its blog post, Apple announced that apps will require “very explicit user action” to have Full Disk Access on your Mac. At the time of the announcement, Apple didn’t make it super clear what that would actually mean. Now, we have an idea of what’s to come.
Code sifter pdfu posted on X that Apple will be getting rid of a clever loophole that developers could use to make it easier for users to enable Full Disk Access. In current versions of macOS, if an app requests a file that would require Full Disk Access, the system denies the request and logs the app as an option in the Settings app for enabling Full Disk Access.
At that point, developers often prompt users to open that section of the Settings app and flip the toggle.
Starting as soon as macOS 27.3, apps that request files outside of the permission scope will no longer get logged, and as a result, won’t show up as an option for quickly toggling Full Disk Access, per leaker pdfu.
Is this better?
At the moment, developers can still request users to drag an app icon to the Settings panel to enable Full Disk Access, even once the feature flag for the aforementioned change is enabled. To me, it still doesn’t quite feel like you’ll need “very explicit user action” to enable Full Disk Access, but it’s possible this will change in the future. This is all still in development.
All in all, I’m not fully convinced that this solves the core problem. Developers are requesting Full Disk Access because they’d like to tap into things like iMessage, and there hasn’t been a better way of doing so. As long as that demand is there, users will likely still have to enable Full Disk Access and risk all sorts of other data, just so they can share their texts with an agent.
Granted, pdfu also mentions the idea of Private Folders, which could potentially allow users to grant scoped access to just the iMessage database folder. It’s unclear if that’ll be possible since there’s little detail on how Private Folders will work. If that’s the case, then hopefully Full Disk Access can stop being the default permission you have to provide for any personal data.
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