Apple has announced plans to introduce stricter controls surrounding its Full Disk Access permission on macOS, responding to growing privacy concerns highlighted by third-party artificial intelligence applications. The move follows reports detailing the extensive data collection practices of Meta’s newly released Muse Personal AI Agent across Apple devices.
Extensive Data Harvesting by Meta’s AI Agent
Meta recently introduced Muse Personal AI Agent for both iPhone and Mac platforms, with the utility quickly ascending to the top rankings on the App Store. However, researchers quickly raised alarms regarding the scope of information the application can access when granted broad permissions on macOS.
Reporting by Wired, citing findings from security researcher Karan Joshi, revealed that Meta instructed the Muse model to extract deep personal data to build comprehensive maps of users’ relationships. Analysis showed that Muse includes instructions allowing it to establish “a page for every person in the user’s life.” This background procedure operates on an hourly schedule, analyzing personal communications across a user’s entire network, including family members, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and individuals the user follows.
According to the documented instructions, the system compiles details including where contacts live, their occupations, recurring conversational threads such as apartment moves or shared savings goals, and critical dates like birthdays and anniversaries. The background profiling can also log detailed personal history, including past trips, resolved arguments, and recent personal milestones.
Apple Responds to Full Disk Access Misuse
The broad access granting Muse the ability to analyze these local communications stems from macOS’s Full Disk Access setting. In a blog post responding to privacy risks associated with AI agents, Apple stated that the feature was originally designed specifically for system backup software, rather than conversational assistants or productivity tools.
Despite the high-level security warning associated with the setting, Apple noted that developers have increasingly leveraged Full Disk Access for alternate tasks, including personal AI software. Furthermore, many consumers have granted these permissions without fully recognizing that the authorization provides applications with unrestricted visibility into local files and private messages.
Apple confirmed it will implement changes to protect users from inadvertently surrendering complete control over their filesystems. “Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action,” the company stated, describing the intervention as a critical step.
Balancing Friction and User Consent
While Apple has not yet specified the exact technical mechanism for the upcoming controls, the company faces the challenge of ensuring explicit consent without creating excessive alert fatigue. In previous platform releases, including macOS Sequoia, Apple adjusted screen recording permissions to require repeated confirmations on a weekly basis and after system restarts. That approach drew criticism from users who argued that recurring prompts created friction for trusted software.
With AI agents increasingly demanding broader access across desktop operating systems, Apple’s upcoming adjustments aim to ensure that users understand the high stakes of granting system-level filesystem permissions before handing over sensitive personal communication archives.
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