I'm no evangelist for LLM assistants, but this seems incredibly improbable and represents a failure of MacOS security if so. If full disk access isn't granted, Mac blocks it from the Downloads folder, to say nothing of actually sensitive paths. I would expect a far more likely case of an accidentally granted permission on another device or a permission that was on and then turned off.
Permissionless action is about to skyrocket as an issue, but this particular scenario strikes me as incredibly unlikely. Would be interested to know if Muse can provide more meaningful data provenance/logs.
Scanning iMessage dbs as a passive part of full disk access (and not a messages grant), if true, is a little sketchy, regardless.
I think what’s more alarming is the macOS nannying UAC-like toggles to block disk access and other “protections” are apparently all UX reducing flash and no actual functionality.
I’d argue this is a five alarm fire for macOS and Meta simply exploited it.
Personally that stuff drives me up the wall, it's the Mac wanting to become the iPhone and close off everything but the App Economy. They'll geofence XCode to the Bay Area or something so only "professionals" can develop software and eventually ban web browsers.
At least on Unix-like systems, if it's free for you to read, then it's free for any process you run as you to read. Sure, macOS has grafted its own weird "permissions" layer on top of the existing OS level permissions, but at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you, with all the powers your user has.
This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.
My mental model is to treat AI agents running on your system as a form of malware that is running in a honeypot you control. You don't want to just get rid of it as you want to observe its behaviour (in the case of malware) or hopefully do something useful (AI). But you certainly shouldn't assume it won't do anything bad to your system.
I do not know about all Unix like OSes, but Linux has sandboxes you can run as you main user. Not as safe as running as a separate user and sandboxing, or running in a VM, but reasonably solid.
> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
In theory, iOS has some protection: the security model is that not all apps can be trusted with everything, so they have to ask for permission to access camera, GPS, texts and so on. I think apple even kicks apps out of its store that try and abuse this.
> After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.
This is absolutely untrue, and impossible.
I haven't spoken directly with Aten, but I have second-hand information from someone who has spoken directly with Aten, and it turns out that he has two Macs and may have allowed Full Disk Access to Muse on one of them.
The only responsibility these guys are feeling is to make trillions. Billions is not enough anymore. Maybe Meta is the most honest of them because they don't even pretend.
I'm no evangelist for LLM assistants, but this seems incredibly improbable and represents a failure of MacOS security if so. If full disk access isn't granted, Mac blocks it from the Downloads folder, to say nothing of actually sensitive paths. I would expect a far more likely case of an accidentally granted permission on another device or a permission that was on and then turned off.
Permissionless action is about to skyrocket as an issue, but this particular scenario strikes me as incredibly unlikely. Would be interested to know if Muse can provide more meaningful data provenance/logs.
Scanning iMessage dbs as a passive part of full disk access (and not a messages grant), if true, is a little sketchy, regardless.
The story from Hunterbrook is also pretty crazy with Muse having much more access to Meta’s social graphs than I suspect most users would hope.
https://hntrbrk.com/breaking-news/muse-doxxing
I think what’s more alarming is the macOS nannying UAC-like toggles to block disk access and other “protections” are apparently all UX reducing flash and no actual functionality.
I’d argue this is a five alarm fire for macOS and Meta simply exploited it.
Personally that stuff drives me up the wall, it's the Mac wanting to become the iPhone and close off everything but the App Economy. They'll geofence XCode to the Bay Area or something so only "professionals" can develop software and eventually ban web browsers.
I think we need more granular permissions, and built in ways to trick apps into thinking they have permissions they do not.
How is this possible? Apple messages are just free for anyone to read?
At least on Unix-like systems, if it's free for you to read, then it's free for any process you run as you to read. Sure, macOS has grafted its own weird "permissions" layer on top of the existing OS level permissions, but at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you, with all the powers your user has.
This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.
My mental model is to treat AI agents running on your system as a form of malware that is running in a honeypot you control. You don't want to just get rid of it as you want to observe its behaviour (in the case of malware) or hopefully do something useful (AI). But you certainly shouldn't assume it won't do anything bad to your system.
I do not know about all Unix like OSes, but Linux has sandboxes you can run as you main user. Not as safe as running as a separate user and sandboxing, or running in a VM, but reasonably solid.
> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
Agreed, but what can you do about your OS vendor?
App store apps are required to run in a sandbox that denies file accesses without user permission.
Muse is not available in the macOS app store. Likely for that reason, among other sandboxing requirements.
In theory, iOS has some protection: the security model is that not all apps can be trusted with everything, so they have to ask for permission to access camera, GPS, texts and so on. I think apple even kicks apps out of its store that try and abuse this.
It’s not possible. User error lol
> After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.
This is absolutely untrue, and impossible.
I haven't spoken directly with Aten, but I have second-hand information from someone who has spoken directly with Aten, and it turns out that he has two Macs and may have allowed Full Disk Access to Muse on one of them.
How is this a story anybody who knows how a computer works knows this is nonsense.
The only responsibility these guys are feeling is to make trillions. Billions is not enough anymore. Maybe Meta is the most honest of them because they don't even pretend.