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by thephyber 1770 days ago
OS X already requires that the user open Settings and give the app elevated permissions to be able to share the screen.

One can argue about the granularity, but you can’t argue that Apple hasn’t already done something.

2 comments

Oh I don't mean to say they haven't done anything, they certainly have. I'm more wondering if there is a system-level privacy feature that they could provide (enforce?) where the system provides a screen share stream handle to only a selected window, similar to the Selected Photos functionality in iOS today.
"Doing something" seems like a really low bar when that "something" is basically useless for the intended use case.
I don’t understand your threat model.

The user chose to install an application, then had to use admin permissions to choose to give that application more access after installation.

How much additional nanny protection should a user get?

Honestly, I kind of agree with this downvoted post. The MacOS permissions prompts are starting to drive me apeshit. Average user is going to start ignoring them and just click yes to everything anyways. Just like everybody already does on their phones. Reminds me of when Windows Vista came out and they started prompting for permissions like crazy. Everybody hated it. Maybe it was just ahead of its time.

I already granted this permission to Teams on my Mac. It's not malicious now, but when an update comes out in the future, it could be, and I've already allowed it. So this whole thing feels kinda dumb. Nobody wants to manage all this shit, and nobody understands it.

They drove me so insane that I abandoned modern macOS entirely.
What's the solution then? MacOS is exposing how often these programs are requiring privileged access.

The solution is partly for applications to limit their use of elevated privileges which we can't always rely on. Therefore MacOS is exposing and providing users with visibility and choice.

Let me turn these prompts off globally. Maybe log the requests somewhere for me to review later if I so choose. I'm just going to hit "Allow" anyway.