I understand the motivation, but the implementation results in little more than security theater in practice.
If you say "yes", the program can do almost anything and you'll have no idea what it's actually doing. If you say "no", you often can't use it for its intended purpose.
They took the iOS model and applied it to their desktop OS and it's just lazy and broken.
At least 50% of the time I see these warnings, the application is attempting to access something I wouldn’t have expected to access. I’m very happy to have the option to say “no” in those cases, so I can either validate that it’s legitimate or delete the sloppy software before it messes things up.
It might be a lazy model, I imagine Apple could’ve done something better if they still gave a damn about desktop, but I’ll take this over nothing. It actively provides value to me.
Maybe Apple could have done better, but I’m not sure how. There is an option to ask for access to a given folder only (if the dev does its job right) in addition to either full access or not. At some point there has to be some kind of trust to be given.
If you say "yes", the program can do almost anything and you'll have no idea what it's actually doing. If you say "no", you often can't use it for its intended purpose.
They took the iOS model and applied it to their desktop OS and it's just lazy and broken.