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Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

Is that really all it takes to disable this? I guess if I'm a malware author looking to do surreptitious recording, I'll have to bundle these extra 10 lines of code lol...

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You can, but note that as a user you have to open System Preferences and check a checkbox to allow said malware to do this. (Apple locked down the accessibility APIs that let apps easily manipulate each other a few years ago.)

Then I’d simply call this program before recording audio.

The user has to manually open System Preferences and allow this program all the same. One place where this workaround would work for malware is embedding in apps that are expected to need these rights though.

On my machine, Dropbox, Alfred, BetterTouchTools, and Bartender have this permission. Zoom is in the list of apps that can be given this permission, but the permission is disabled by default and Zoom works fine without it - though the very fact that some may have given this permission to Zoom might be a cause of alarm! And it's possible Apple may patch away the ability of accessibility tools to mess with this, without giving a better system-level way to disable it...

If I had to guess Zoom is probably using the accessibility API to implement their remote control feature. I don't know enough about the other apps to guess why they need it, but dropbox needing accessibility permissions does sound strange.

According to their website, Dropbox for Mac needs the accessibility permissions for:

"The Dropbox badge

"Seeing who’s viewed your files

"Better prioritization for file syncing"

https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/mac-p...

I mean, I’d take advantage of that program. If it’s already installed then it probably has the permissions granted. So I’d only have to run it before recording audio.

The security agencies would pay good money for a solution that bypasses this requirement. They were paying good money for exploits that disabled the tally lamp on web cams.

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