Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).

It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.

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coldtea 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.

That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.

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tpmoney 2 days ago | parent [-]

Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?

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coldtea 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't it obvious? It's that the per app permission for this folder shouldn't fucking be "whatever your OS user can access" or "full disk access" but either fine grained at the folder level - just like "documents" folder has.

If an app needs to read the local social graph it should ask for a permission to THAT folder (or a slightly more general "read social graph data", like we have "read Reminders data"). Not bloddy full disk access or bust.

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tpmoney 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, I guess they could add the additional lower level directory permission, but to what end? This is data that is clearly not intended to be consumed directly by other applications, just specific services the OS provides and presumably sandboxed/filtered through the OS's internal APIs for accessing anything built off of this data.

	▲	coldtea 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Sure, I guess they could add the additional lower level directory permission, but to what end? To the end that apps read only the data you allow them to, not coarse grained all or nothing. >This is data that is clearly not intended to be consumed directly by other applications, just specific services the OS provides and presumably sandboxed/filtered through the OS's internal APIs for accessing anything built off of this data. But that's exactly the problem. That "this is data that is clearly not intended to be consumed directly by other applications, just specific services the OS provides" and yet it is allowed to be read by any application that gets "full disk access". What you state as already the case is precisely what I want them to fix: that it's, as of now, NOT "sandboxed/filtered through the OS's internal APIs for accessing anything built off of this data".

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hparadiz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.