I think the issue comes in with terminal emulators and CLI harnesses. TCC permissions are inherited from the "responsible" process, so if you grant Terminal.app or ghostty.app FDA, you've granted zsh or bash or python or any goddamned thing you can run in a shell FDA.

Granting terminal full disk access grants arbitrary scripts full disk access. There’s a lot you can do with ACLs and the permissions system, but it’s not reflected in the UI for settings.

Then there’s allowing access to documents, downloads, desktop, external disks. This should really allow the user to select a path or paths for applications, because these options are way too broad (especially external disks).

Edit: I should say, the model it was created with (select a folder, all media in that folder is mirrored) requires such permissions. One could imagine designs that don’t.

But your terminal shouldn't be accessing any files; you just need to be able to launch /bin/zsh or whatever you use as your shell. The shell needs to be able to access files, but its container doesn't.

Of course, you could go farther. For example, on OpenBSD, even /bin/ksh has been somewhat sandboxed; it can see most of the file system, but the things it can do have been limited:

  if (pledge("stdio rpath wpath cpath fattr flock getpw proc "
      "exec tty id", NULL) == -1) {

For those who haven’t heard of this, sandboxed apps can request access to a file or folder and persist such access using a security-scoped bookmark. The user however does not know whether the app chooses to persist this bookmark or not; in other words the user does not know whether in each case they are granting a one-time access or persistent access.

I think so.

I don't know where this "ownership" debate came from. My ownership of my machine depends on strict, broad + fine grained control over what third-party devs (who are not me) get to do with my machine. Our interests are incompatible and hostile, in an era where most "native apps" ship analytics and marketing SDKs, or are videcoded. If macOS didn't offer these controls I would run every apps in a browser where it's sandboxed. This isn't the 90s.

This change is a reaction to a viral story from a tech reporter who shipped all his texts to Meta without meaning to, which tells you there's a consent and transparency issue for nontechnical users. I don't think anyone in the industry has figured out a proper solution. Unless you never interact with nontechnical people, it impacts your privacy indirectly no matter what you do. Though as technical user I hope we can get more fine-grained control and auditing.

> Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge and understanding.

If you think an app from (say) Facebook can be trusted with unrestricted access to your whole machine, you're at least a bit naive.