macOS Sequoia adds weekly permission prompt for screen recording apps | Hacker News Reader

macOS Sequoia adds weekly permission prompt for screen recording apps

9to5mac.com

Before yesterday's Sequoia update, this was a daily permission prompt.

In a vacuum, I don't consider this to be an extremely poor decision; the system picker has a mostly-sane interface. Apps that capture the screen currently have an extremely long leash, and the hole for an app that decided to become malicious and start (for example) exfiltrating capture data is... extremely wide.

However, for apps that took pains prior to macOS Sequoia in offering a reasonable and privacy-focused consent interface for screen capture (that doesn't use the picker, that is), this prompt is insulting and a slap in the face. Apple did not do a good job with its developers with the introduction of this 'feature'.

Furthermore, the system picker lacks important functionality (can't capture apps without currently visible windows, can't do 'everything-except-these-apps' captures) and its configurations have no time-to-live, meaning an app would have to use the picker every single time it starts up, or else get this prompt. This really undermines the picker and the prompt's effectiveness, and it's disappointing to see something well-intentioned be self-defeating in this way.

In general, ScreenCaptureKit is one of the most poorly managed and poorly functioning APIs Apple has introduced in recent years. It offers solid functionality, but every release introduces a legion of new bugs and performance regressions. I dunno if someone key to this APIs success quit or what, but it really needs to be fixed up by someone with actual care for the details.

Apple could just make it obvious when something is recording the screen. If there is an orange dot what it means is a mystery, sometimes there is no further info in control center so you have to guess was it some recent discord call or you got pwned. Simply fixing that would address a lot of the problem. Is that better in Sequoia?

I think that would be a lot easier to target as an exploit than the engineering they would have already done to the broader solution of permissions

Especially if left unmonitored/updated

Of course. Draw a red rectangle around the screen, invert the menu bar, whatever.

Instead, they are copying the “accept cookies” / Windows Vista policy of nagging the user to the point of oblivion.

an icon appears in the menu bar when an app is capturing the screen. clicking it says which app it is.

That already exists, right? I’m guessing they are concerned it’s too subtle.

No, what I meant doesn't exist in current macOS. I record screen often so I just checked:) There's an abstract orange dot on control center and often no further info if you expand control center. Sometimes the dot is there even though I didn't record. Which app did it? Who knows.

Apple won't say it explicitly, but this change is designed to limit access to data that can be used to build systems or applications that understand the context of the things you're working on on this machine. This is just one small example of Apple's strategy to build the world's smartest operating system. The operating system's built-in artificial intelligence-based assistants need screenshots over time to understand context. A picture is worth a thousand words. A vein of gold.

Unfortunately their strategy of being the smartest involves making sure no-one else can make better system on a Mac. I you are the only game in town, you are by definition the best.

It was introduced in 10.14 (2018) before all the llm and especially the multimodal mambo jambo. I am all for a good conspiracy theory but this is a bit much especially because it's more lenient now...

deep exasperated sigh

If you're too young to remember a time when Windows didn't bug you every five minutes with a prompt that said 'Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?', you should know computers used to just silently do what you wanted them to do. Shame that macOS is going the same way.

Yeah, this was an era where just opening the wrong email would fill your computer with malware.

Even “legitimate” companies have exploited users to the extent they physically could, resulting in the situation where we are currently at where the OS makers have to fight back for the users.

> opening the wrong email would fill your computer with malware

While true, this likely isn't a situation where prompts would have helped, sadly. That's a problem that was fixed by hardening email clients.

It’s all part of a general shift to security and privacy. An invisible app sitting in the background recording the screen without the users knowledge is really really bad. So dangerous that it deserves a weekly prompt to make sure you really know it’s happening.

That's true. I'm not even going to argue that guardrails are bad on balance, I'm just dispositionally against them if I can't turn them off (to Windows's credit, you can disable UAC). If this goes away when you disable SIP, that's fine.

I’ve had less and less incentive to upgrade every year for over a decade.

I wonder when I’ll reach a tipping point.

I reached it so long ago. My most "up-to-date" Mac runs OS X 10.10. No intention to ever run anything newer.

At some point Photoshop and Chrome stop working, then I’m mostly hamstrung.

Which makes you miss all sort of security updates (under the hood unlike the one mentioned in the article).

I don't use it for any online stuff, so that's not really a concern. It's rarely even on the LAN at all, let alone connecting to the net. Further, I have many way, way older computers. :)

One of the most annoying things about not upgrading macOS are the recurring Notifications that try to get you to upgrade. There's no way in recent versions to disable them AFAIK. They are especially grating if the machine has multiple user accounts, as switching to a different account tends to trigger one.

> There's no way in recent versions to disable them AFAIK.

For a special case, it used to be possible to disable all notifications during set periods of time. Something like: Settings > Focus Mode > Set a Schedule > 4am to 3:59am Every Day. (So, during 1 minute of the day in the wee hours of the morning a notification could theoretically pop up, but in practice it never did.)

Of course, this blanket approach only worked if one didn't actually want any notifications at all from any app (including OS upgrade nags, or anything else).

But I used to compute that way. And it worked to prevent showing update notifications.

No idea if it works on the latest macOS versions, but it did not not too many years ago.

Of course, I do rely on notifications now, though...

There's also the risk of accidentally hitting the upgrade button and at best losing a few hours to the upgrade or at worst several days as you deal with recovery.

Had a recent bad experience when I accidentally pressed upgrade on an old macbook air running Catalina. I ultimately had to restore from a time machine backup to get it working again. The internet recovery failed most of the time and needed multiple attempts to boot through. Attempts to try and let the upgrade go through would always result in the estimated time remaining disappearing after a while, and nothing happening. Attempting to re-install Catalina from the recovery menu also failed with an infinite loading spinner after a while and nothing clickable. Additionally there is no indicator that the wifi disconnects and you need to re-connect when attempting to re-install. I only found that out when I accidentally triggered an accessibility setting(I think VoiceOver) that showed the top bar again with the wifi icon. Even then there was another workaround needed to actually connect since I believe it wasn't possible to type in the password as you couldn't select the password dialog box.

I wasn't completely without fault, I'd stopped the upgrade early to since the upgrade was taking too long, I also lost the recovery partition the first time I tried and failed to reinstall which meant that internet recovery was the only way to boot the mac without it immediately trying to upgrade or re-install. The cli is accessible from the recovery mode which did allow me to take an additional backup of the laptop's contents with more up to date things.

In general it seems that the upgrade and recovery process is not supported at all after a couple of years which makes these upgrade notifications a constant risk if you ever click to install one of them. It also reminded me the importance of keeping backups, especially of the filevault key.

I don't see myself moving onto Windows 11 and when Windows 10 becomes impossible to use, I'll genuinely give Linux a try

Linux is great as long as you aren't expecting it to be "Free Windows" (as so many folks do; It's not by a long-shot; It's an entirely different animal altogether). Embrace the idea that it's gonna be somewhat different, as a fair few of those differences are actually significant improvements over the way Windows often does things. I ditched Windows back in the Win7 days, and haven't regretted it one little bit. Microsoft doesn't own my computer. I do. ;)

You don’t have to upgrade. The popup reminding you of the new version is a bit annoying, but that’s it

I wonder what kind of impact this will have on boss-ware. Will there be ways to override this from an administrator point of view?

I wonder when organisations will learn to lead and manage effectively instead of micromanaging time via screen captures.

Corps can’t silently allow apps to have screen recording access. The user still has to allow the app access when it requests it.

They can allow/block list certain apps from ever being allowed, but it’s still up to the user to enable it via an interactive prompt.

This just adds to prompt fatigue, which is already bad enough. Users don’t read this shit, they just get annoyed by it and blindly click Allow.

In my experience, they'll blindly click the "primary" button. On macOS, the denial button is the primary button for permission prompts, so they're far more likely to get annoyed and blindly click "Don't Allow."

This particular dialog doesn’t have a “don’t allow” button at least for now.

The last two companies I’ve worked at have made me install some device management tool which requests permissions to do basically everything. It’s not clear what data the company actually gets and how many of the capabilities are being used.

I’d certainly appreciate info that says “yes, your screen is being recorded right now” rather than a long list of permissions.

There’s a green or blue icon that gets displayed in the menu bar when something is recording the screen/audio or using webcam since a few major releases ago.

The override is: "you didn't accept the screen recording permission like you're required to, either do that from now on or you're fired"

It at least does make it extremely clear to the employee that they are being watched.

DisplayLink (that allows to add more external displays than what Apple allows) relies on the screen recording feature. I think it creates virtual displays, captures and pipe them to the connected monitors.

It's going to be very annoying if I have to grant it permission on a weekly basis

Clicking a button once per week shouldn't be a huge chore.

You can even automate it with something like Karabiner or Keyboard Maestro :D

It would be much nicer if screen recording permissions does not need the application to be restarted. Then they could even ask the screen recording permissions for every specific instance if they wanted.

This is the worst part about a weekly reminder. It's highly inconvenient to be in the middle of a zoom meeting, ready to start my presentation, and then apologize to everyone because Apple decided it's time to ask for permission again

Sad to hear as someone currently building an app with screen recording capabilities. Hopefully the outrage is enough for them to reconsider

It's a single dialog once per week.

If your app is good enough, nobody will abandon it because of that.

You’ve definitely had to deal with a recurring popup before. It’s annoying and puts a bad taste in your mouth about what caused it. (And most users won’t think macOS is the issue, they’ll see a popup saying <AppName>)

It's just disappointing that the direction of computing is towards ever stupider lower more basic levels for the foreseeable. This sort of guarding & lowering of expectations is the only thing the OS seems to be working on these days.

Will Apple's apps trigger the same weekly permission prompt?

Guessing this is going to kill Bartender. I don’t love that it does screen recording, but this is probably the nail in the coffin.

This is a bad article, missing half what it needs to cover the subject. It’s mostly describing a single dialog box with two affordances, and it only describes the effect of one of them — “Continue to Allow”. It’s reasonable to think that the other — “Open System Settings” - allows one to make the change permanently.

> It’s reasonable to think that the other — “Open System Settings” - allows one to make the change permanently.

It does not. All it does is what it says on the tin- open System Settings.

Unfortunately no, the only fix is for apps to adopt the newer APIs.

The alert dialog is to direct you to disable screen recording permissions altogether, not to disable the warning.

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