I'm no evangelist for LLM assistants, but this seems incredibly improbable and represents a failure of MacOS security if so. If full disk access isn't granted, Mac blocks it from the Downloads folder, to say nothing of actually sensitive paths. I would expect a far more likely case of an accidentally granted permission on another device or a permission that was on and then turned off.
Permissionless action is about to skyrocket as an issue, but this particular scenario strikes me as incredibly unlikely. Would be interested to know if Muse can provide more meaningful data provenance/logs.
Scanning iMessage dbs as a passive part of full disk access (and not a messages grant), if true, is a little sketchy, regardless.
Agent sandboxing/access control is one of the biggest problems to be solved before this technology really should go mainstream.
Even as a technical person, it's not trivial to sandbox agents correctly. The fact that an mis-clicked permission popup could give an agent unrestricted access to a user's disk is a massive risk vector in the hands of lay people who barely understand how any of this works.
So much of current security depends on the model of tying access control to a user account. A lot has to be re-thought in terms of how to grant access to an agent working on the user's behalf, in a way that doesn't make it completely useless, and also doesn't require every user to become a sysadmin managing fine-grained agent permissions manually.
I think sandboxing could be solved if effort was put into it. Webassembly seems like a great way to enforce data and execution boundaries for an LLM, for example.
I think the problem is that LLM providers are dis-incentivized from pursuing it because their ethos is gobbling up any and all data they can get.
> Oops, we accidentally yoinked your personal documents, photos, and videos and they’re now swimming in our model’s data ocean! We’re sorrrry, oh well let’s move on.
It’s up to the users to use tools that enforce security/privacy. Open source harnesses like pi.dev seem like a good path forward to me
Nothing you said was wrong, but I can’t imagine giving Meta the benefit of the doubt on, well, anything. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 137 times…
I think what’s more alarming is the macOS nannying UAC-like toggles to block disk access and other “protections” are apparently all UX reducing flash and no actual functionality.
I’d argue this is a five alarm fire for macOS and Meta simply exploited it.
Personally that stuff drives me up the wall, it's the Mac wanting to become the iPhone and close off everything but the App Economy. They'll geofence XCode to the Bay Area or something so only "professionals" can develop software and eventually ban web browsers.
At least on Unix-like systems, if it's free for you to read, then it's free for any process you run as you to read. Sure, macOS has grafted its own weird "permissions" layer on top of the existing OS level permissions, but at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you, with all the powers your user has.
This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.
My mental model is to treat AI agents running on your system as a form of malware that is running in a honeypot you control. You don't want to just get rid of it as you want to observe its behaviour (in the case of malware) or hopefully do something useful (AI). But you certainly shouldn't assume it won't do anything bad to your system.
> at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you with all the powers your user has.
This is not at all how it works on macOS, which is what is being discussed in the original post. There are a million different things that require per-app explicit opt-in permissions. This is a case of user error.
I do not know about all Unix like OSes, but Linux has sandboxes you can run as you main user. Not as safe as running as a separate user and sandboxing, or running in a VM, but reasonably solid.
> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
In theory, iOS has some protection: the security model is that not all apps can be trusted with everything, so they have to ask for permission to access camera, GPS, texts and so on. I think apple even kicks apps out of its store that try and abuse this.
> Meta says that Muse has to obey permissions that users set up. It won't access any data you don't explicitly allow it to access.
Is this a setting configured in Muse itself?
> It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host. When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.bAfter doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.
Is full disk access enforced on the OS side, or the app side? Like is this claiming MacOS security was breached by Muse somehow acting in spite of deliberately disabled access somehow?
> After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.
This is absolutely untrue, and impossible.
I haven't spoken directly with Aten, but I have second-hand information from someone who has spoken directly with Aten, and it turns out that he has two Macs and may have allowed Full Disk Access to Muse on one of them.
Permissionless action is about to skyrocket as an issue, but this particular scenario strikes me as incredibly unlikely. Would be interested to know if Muse can provide more meaningful data provenance/logs.
Scanning iMessage dbs as a passive part of full disk access (and not a messages grant), if true, is a little sketchy, regardless.
Even as a technical person, it's not trivial to sandbox agents correctly. The fact that an mis-clicked permission popup could give an agent unrestricted access to a user's disk is a massive risk vector in the hands of lay people who barely understand how any of this works.
So much of current security depends on the model of tying access control to a user account. A lot has to be re-thought in terms of how to grant access to an agent working on the user's behalf, in a way that doesn't make it completely useless, and also doesn't require every user to become a sysadmin managing fine-grained agent permissions manually.
I think the problem is that LLM providers are dis-incentivized from pursuing it because their ethos is gobbling up any and all data they can get.
> Oops, we accidentally yoinked your personal documents, photos, and videos and they’re now swimming in our model’s data ocean! We’re sorrrry, oh well let’s move on.
It’s up to the users to use tools that enforce security/privacy. Open source harnesses like pi.dev seem like a good path forward to me
https://hntrbrk.com/breaking-news/muse-doxxing
I’d argue this is a five alarm fire for macOS and Meta simply exploited it.
This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.
This is not at all how it works on macOS, which is what is being discussed in the original post. There are a million different things that require per-app explicit opt-in permissions. This is a case of user error.
> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.
Agreed, but what can you do about your OS vendor?
Muse is not available in the macOS app store. Almost certainly because of the sandboxing requirements.
Is this a setting configured in Muse itself?
> It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host. When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.bAfter doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.
Is full disk access enforced on the OS side, or the app side? Like is this claiming MacOS security was breached by Muse somehow acting in spite of deliberately disabled access somehow?
Has this been reproduced / recorded?
This is absolutely untrue, and impossible.
I haven't spoken directly with Aten, but I have second-hand information from someone who has spoken directly with Aten, and it turns out that he has two Macs and may have allowed Full Disk Access to Muse on one of them.