A desktop application has need to instruct the OS to draw its window. That can be reasonably unprivileged--an app owns its windows, this is easy. Most applications have no need to read raster data from its window. Even fewer have need to read raster data from the desktop itself.
Desktop applications are not "meant to" have access they don't need. They sometimes have that access as an accident of history, but they are not "meant to"; we've known about the principle of least privilege for a long time. And the MacOS sandbox (which, to be honest, doesn't work very well, but that's neither here nor there) is intended to enforce application privileges and reduce escalation.
Please humor me, why in the world does an app need to read/write your screen? It is provided a window for that.
If it doesn't need to read/write your screen in order to provide its features, and then does it, wouldn't you agree that something is fishy? Wouldn't you like to know when fishy things are going on?
What is the point of security if any app you download can see everything you do?
> Please humor me, why in the world does an app need to read/write your screen?
The most obvious answer would be to take screenshots, like GIMP's "Create from screenshot" command or a dedicated program like the snippet tool in Windows. Many graphics tools offer that functionality, even some that you can run from the command line.
Other, similarly widely available functionality, is to record the desktop - a common functionality needed for screencasting and video streaming (think Twitch) programs. This also need to capture audio. Also a more niche tool is to create captures directly to GIF files (i have such a tool both in Windows and Linux).
Of course less commonly implemented but still very useful functionality is for remote access/remote desktop (in which case you also need to also capture input events but also create fake input events indistinguishable from the user's events).
Finally several utilities also benefit from being able to read the screen, like utilities to magnify and perhaps enhance part of a screen (that can be useful for people with sight issues, or for developers to inspect the output of a graphics program at the pixel level without flattening their face on the monitor) or utilities like color pickers or even just funny toys that manipulate the screen contents (i've seen a game at the past grab a screenshot of your desktop and then zoom it out when you launch it).
> What is the point of security if any app you download can see everything you do?
I'd turn that around: what is the point of security if the apps you download cannot do their job because of it? At the end of the day computers need to be useful, not to be burned and buried in a waste disposal field (where they'd be in their most secure state).
> not to be burned and buried in a waste disposal field (where they'd be in their most secure state)
This is just a simple strawman.
It's not that hard to have a middle ground, just disallow apps from using things like your webcam or screen without your explicit permission. Just because 1 program uses that functionality doesn't necessitate it to be common to every single program you ever run.
iOS already manages this. Just have a notification pop up when you use the program to allow X access from system settings. Certain programs already do something similar by requesting access from Accessibility, like window managers (albeit that's to get around certain limitations).
If someone figures out a way for this sort of thing to be unintrusive while still being effective, i wouldn't mind it but i haven't seen anything like that. The notification popups you suggest are both intrusive and ineffective because, honestly, if i want to do some task anything that tries to alert me about something unrelated to that task ("hey, this needs net access" - sure, ok whatever... i cannot think about that right now, i need to actually do what i want to do) is something i am very unlikely to put any thought over so i'll just accept. I mean, i used to check the permissions on my Android mobile but after a year or so i stopped because at the end of the day the question is "do you want to run this program or not"? And considering i already downloaded the program to run it, the answer is obvious.
This stuff is really barely a notch above expecting people to read EULAs.
How often do you think most users read the screen, especially using something other than the screenshot tool of the operating system?
As an iOS developer I run Xscope to check details of designs, I don't know, maybe once every two weeks? And I guess I've probably used Acorn's color picker outside its own window during the last year, but I'm not sure about that.
I'd imagine that most users need apps reading arbitrary pixels off their screen less often than I do. I'd appreciate a warning from the operating system when an app tries to do that.
> I'd turn that around: what is the point of security if the apps you download cannot do their job because of it? At the end of the day computers need to be useful, not to be burned and buried in a waste disposal field (where they'd be in their most secure state).
I'd like to phrase it as "security vs. usefulness, pick one".
Unfortunately, I don't see a good way out of this. The more secure apps and the OS gets, the less useful it is - it loses composability and interoperability, any remnants of them being mediated by third parties (basically, see how SaaS apps talk to each other, and imagine this is your desktop now). But the more useful an app or OS is, the easier it is to make users selfpwn themselves through a stupid or compromised download.
I refuse to accept that I'm not allowed to do whatever I want with my own device, including running code that does whatever it wants with other applications, and especially things the authors of those other applications didn't anticipate or want me to do. But then, I can't see how a regular person could use the same computer without fear of their passwords or data getting stolen.
Are there any smart people working on this? Do they have any suggestions?
I'd like to know about it indeed, what i wouldn't like is to be spammed with annoying UAC-like questions every time an application needs to do something or even worse: not being able to do it.
And no, i wont get spyware, i never got spyware in the three decades i use software when desktop systems were at the apex of their popularity and i used the most popular of them - i doubt i'll get any sort of spyware today, especially when i'm not even using an OS that spyware authors would even bother with.
The very article of this post is an instance of spyware that any developer can implement. In effect, if you're using a Mac, any app can be spyware and you will never, ever know.
That sounds terrible. This behavior is how desktop applications are meant to work. I’m surprised this surprised anyone.