Last month, Apple announced it would tighten privacy controls in a future macOS update, in response to AI agents requesting full disk access and then behaving dishonestly with user data without their full knowledge. Now we have an idea of what the changes might look like.
In its blog post, Apple announced that apps will require “a very explicit user action” to have full disk access on your Mac. At the time of the announcement, Apple didn’t clarify what this would actually mean. Now we have an idea of what will happen.
Code sifter pdfu posted on X that Apple will close 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 rejects the request and registers the app as an option in the Settings app to enable full disk access.
At that point, developers often ask users to open that section of the Settings app and turn on the switch.
Starting with macOS 27.3, apps that request files outside of the permission scope will no longer be logged and, as a result, will not appear as an option to quickly enable full disk access, according to leaker pdfu.
Is it better?
At the moment, developers can still require users to drag an app icon into the Settings panel to enable full disk access, even once the feature flag for the above change is enabled. To me, it still doesn’t sound like you’ll need “very explicit user action” to enable full disk access, but it’s possible that this will change in the future. All of this is still in development.
All in all, I’m not entirely convinced that this solves the core problem. Developers require full disk access because they would like to take advantage of things like iMessage and there wasn’t a better way to do it. As long as that demand exists, users will likely still have to enable full disk access, and risk all kinds of other data, just to be able to share their texts with an agent.
Of course, pdfu also mentions the idea of private folders, which could potentially allow users to grant targeted access to just the iMessage database folder. It’s unclear whether this will be possible as there are few details on how private folders will work. If so, hopefully full disk access can stop being the default permission you have to provide for all personal data.
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