Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to prevent third-party app developers from misusing them to access message history.
Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent, Muse, sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a colleague on Apple Messages. Aten said he never gave Muse permission to read his messages and assumed they were prohibited. Last week, social media exploded with many people agreeing and saying the incident showed that AI assistants with access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts and other resources were akin to a jigsaw or other power tool. Although potentially useful, they can cause real damage if not used carefully.
He said/she said
Meta CTO David Singleton joined the fray with a rebuttal that seemed solid. For Muse to access Apple Messages, a user must manually grant it two privileges. One is Full Disk Access, a macOS system-level permission. The other is to enable a Messages connector setting in Muse.
“Integrating Messages into the Muse Mac app is optional,” Singleton said. “Your Muse can only read the contents of messages if full disk access at the macOS system level is granted and the Messages connector is enabled.”
Singleton’s involvement was clear. Muse would only have been able to read Aton’s messages if he had both settings enabled, and if so, the Chronicler only had himself to blame – and certainly not Meta.
Earlier this week, I spoke to macOS security expert Patrick Wardle, who questioned Singleton’s refusal. His reasoning: “From a technical point of view, with FDA (full disk access), everything (non-root file), is readable, browsing history, browser cookies, chats, etc etc etc. » I asked Meta how Muse couldn’t read messages when the application had full disk access, but all other applications with that privilege could. Meta PR’s only response was to quote Singleton as saying: “Integrating Messages into the Muse Mac app is optional. Your Muse can only read the contents of Messages if full disk access at the macOS system level is granted and the Messages connector is enabled.”
Gn tech
