[_kush]

They only check if your mic is on, not what you're saying (they can't hear you unless you've granted mic permission). They also look at your network traffic to see if audio is being sent (otherwise you can get a lot of false positives). Using mic + network data is a common way to spot meetings -- my app LookAway[0] does something similar to pause reminders during calls.

[0]: https://lookaway.app

[AlexandrB]

I thought you had to give explicit permission for an app to monitor network traffic in macOS? I'm assuming your app asks for this, but it sounds like Notion does not if the GP was surprised by the monitoring.

[tbeseda]

My Notion install (macOS) asked to discover devices on my network. I'm assuming this permission is related to "monitoring network traffic".

[_kush]

No, that’s the new "Local Network" prompt which started appearing since macOS 15. Any app that opens a multicast/broadcast socket (mDNS, SSDP, WebRTC ICE, etc.) now has to ask. Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default, so you see this dialog.

[jraph]

> Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default

Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes.

[JadeNB]

> Feels like a bad default, it teaches user to ignore and say yes.

I believe that, broadly speaking, from all but the most scrupulous app developers' point of view, it is a good thing for users to blindly agree to permissions. This is obviously true if they are doing something nefarious, but even true if not, since every user who denies a permission to your app is a user who might be writing a nasty review about such-and-such an advertised feature that doesn't work. I hope very much that my OS will make it easy for me to behave in a security-conscious way—a hope that is almost always disappointed!—but I do not even bother to have such a hope for all but my most beloved apps, which are often beloved for exactly that reason.

[jraph]

"Hey, head's up, this doesn't work because you didn't give us permission to {...}, needed because {...}. [Fix this]" would not be the end of the world.

[wustep]

I think this has to do with Chromium x MacOS -- https://issues.chromium.org/issues/346505950

https://x.com/rauchg/status/1846590635677004039?s=46&t=kVfjh...

[simple10]

That's interesting. Although I wasn't able to find any confirming info that allowing the "locate local devices" permissions allows for network monitoring. It seems to only allow Bonjour and multicast DNS. Anyone know for sure what it allows?

[mh-]

This would certainly be news to me as well. Packet capture (even local) has historically required superuser perms, but I'm not up to speed on how MacOS permissions work in this regard since the launch of System/Network Extensions.

After writing the above, I've just reviewed [0] - as much as I could in 5 minutes - and as far as I can tell it confirms our understanding. To do packet filtering or interception or reading, you'd need to do [1].

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3179-u...

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/NetworkExtension/c...

[odo1242]

Yes, it would be that one

[_kush]

You don't need to give any explicit permissions for the snapshot of current sockets.

[jjcob]

Yeah, non-sandboxed apps can iterate over open file descriptors. It's quite useful to detect eg. which app on your local machine is connecting over TCP. I hope they don't lock it down. It doesn't allow intercepting traffic, but you can see what connects where.