Apple is rewriting the rules for one of the most powerful permissions on the Mac. In a developer note titled Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS, the company said some apps are using the setting in ways that expose far more of a user’s system than people realize.
Full Disk Access was built so backup tools could work. It bypasses the sandboxing that normally guards apps, letting a program read Mail, Messages, Safari history, Time Machine backups and settings for every account on the machine. Apple said AI agents that run on the desktop have raised the risks tied to that level of access.
The change lands days after a journalist said Meta’s Muse app had read his private messages without permission, a claim Meta disputes. A separate Wired report found a flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac app that could have exposed sensitive data.
Going forward, Apple said only users who genuinely want to grant an app this extraordinary level of access will be able to do so, and only through very explicit user action. The post gave no date or macOS version and named no developer.
The prompt for Apple is trust. Desktop agents are useful precisely because they can touch files, mail and messages, and the same reach makes them a single point of failure. Apple’s answer is to keep the capability but slow down the moment of consent.
