--- title: Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS | daily.dev description: Apple announced upcoming changes to how Full Disk Access works on macOS, aiming to require more explicit user action before apps can gain this broad level of... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS | daily.dev og:description: Apple announced upcoming changes to how Full Disk Access works on macOS, aiming to require more explicit user action before apps can gain this broad level of... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/OccWt0mf7.png og:image:alt: Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Apple announced upcoming changes to how Full Disk Access works on macOS, aiming to require more explicit user action before apps can gain this broad level of system access. The company cited risks from backup and communication apps misusing the permission to access files, mail, messages, and browsing history, and flagged growing concerns as AI agents become more autonomous and capable of exploiting such access. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why is Apple changing how Full Disk Access works on macOS? Apple is introducing additional controls because some developers use Full Disk Access to expose more than intended, including files, mail, messages, and browsing history, without users fully understanding the risk. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of people users communicate with. Apple wants users to grant this access only through very explicit action, partly due to growing risks from increasingly autonomous AI agents. _Developers building macOS apps that rely on broad permissions can track evolving privacy requirements on daily.dev._ ### What is Full Disk Access used for on macOS and why is it risky? Full Disk Access is a macOS permission originally meant to let backup apps function properly by bypassing normal data-protection controls. It grants access to essentially everything on a system, including files, mail, messages, and browsing history. Some developers exploit this broad scope beyond backup use cases, creating privacy risks for users and the people they communicate with, especially as AI agents gain more autonomy. _Anyone weighing how much system access to request in a macOS app can follow this topic on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 175 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-10-09). **TL;DR:** Reaction is split between developers who welcome tighter, more explicit controls on an access level widely seen as dangerously broad (especially with AI agents and coding assistants in the mix), and those who find Apple's permission prompts already excessive and see this as further paternalism with vague details. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 45% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - Many agree full disk access is an overly broad grant that AI agents and backup/communication apps have been shown to abuse or escalate toward. - Some see this as a sane continuation of existing sandboxing trends (Gatekeeper, SIP, per-folder permissions) rather than something new. - A few point out that terminal/CLI harnesses inheriting FDA for any spawned process is a real, serious gap worth fixing. **The pushback** - Several feel macOS is already drowning in permission dialogs and this will make it worse without solving the real problem. - Some argue the real gap is that terminal apps grant FDA to every child process (shells, scripts, agents) with no fine-grained or session-scoped control. - Others are skeptical Apple will stop at better toggles and instead worry about further gatekeeping of non-App Store software or developer workflows. - A few find the announcement vague and short on concrete technical detail about what's actually changing. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): Some welcome more scrutiny of local AI agents having disk access, while others wish for a return to simpler UNIX-style permissions or a proper sandbox model, with real examples of people deleting AI tools over privilege escalation. - hackernews (heated): A large, sprawling thread with strong disagreement between people who see broad disk access as an outdated, dangerous default and those who feel increasingly paternalistic restrictions and prompt fatigue are undermining user control of their own machines. **Hottest debate:** Whether unrestricted full disk access was always a reasonable default users should control, or whether treating all third-party software (including AI agents) as adversarial by default is now necessary. **Open questions** - How will per-app folder access actually be revoked or audited after it's granted? - Will terminal apps and CLI-based AI harnesses get session- or command-scoped permissions instead of inheriting blanket FDA for all child processes? - Will Apple extend this toward requiring its own approval for any app requesting full disk access, even outside the App Store? **Highlights** > If anything in a world with agents, these TCC dialogs just need to have an "allow once", just like Location Services has on iOS, and just like most harnesses have, a la "Do you want to allow $AGENT to run the following command?" A. Yes. B. Yes and don't ask for $command, C. No but instead just asking "Do you want to allow Claude Desktop access to files and folders on your Desktop?" A. Once. B. Always C. No I think the issue comes in with terminal emulators and CLI harnesses. TCC permissions are inherited from the "responsible" process, so if you grant Terminal.app or ghostty.app FDA, you've granted zsh or bash or python or any goddamned thing you can run in a shell FDA. > — [wpm on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49940099) > Apple, as always, seem extremely determined to make sure that they protect things on your computer from being accessed by you. Apple Intelligence is a great example of this. Everything can funnel up to Siri, but neither you nor any other app on your computer can see what is fed to it by all of the APIs that would provide it data. So anyone who adds support for it is enabling Apple to do their usual slow broken thing with Siri and not enabling any other way you might want to use software or AI with that data. > — [tekacs on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938216) > I’m unfamiliar with some of the tech stack at $WORK so I use Claude to navigate it. It’s very good at this sort of thing. The Claude desktop app for MacOS was becoming more and more insistent on escalating privs that I ended up deleting it. It turns out that the web app works great if you add it to the dock from safari. It’s functionally identical to the desktop app but it doesn’t continually ask to install “plugins” in MacOS. I used Claude code for a while, it is an excellent search engine for our large existing code base, but they took all the default guardrails away, so an innocuous prompt can have it write code, compile and attempt to run it, without permission. I absolutely hate it. Using the products of these awful companies is bad enough. Giving them access to all my data is just asking for trouble. > — [doctor\_eval on lobsters · 1 points](https://lobste.rs/s/9ipypq/updates_full_disk_access_macos#c_ui10xi) > But this is what it is currently. At the moment, not only is it a toggle, but unlike almost all other permissions, you can't just request the permission. You have to send the user to the system settings pane for it and have them manually toggle it on there. It's hard to imagine how it could be more explicit than it is currently. I imagine they have something draconian planned. > — [tekacs on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938241) > It's impressive how there are absolutely no details in this announcement... I learnt nothing. Seriously though, MacOS could really use a serious sandbox implementation that's actually usable and documented. sandbox-exec is right there and waiting. > — [viraptor on lobsters · 3 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/9ipypq/updates_full_disk_access_macos#c_s3l3ar) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/9ipypq/updates_full_disk_access_macos) · 11 points · 16 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937631) · 76 points · 159 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I said no and Apple said yes](https://daily.dev/posts/i-said-no-and-apple-said-yes-qhorzoika) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security](https://daily.dev/posts/microsoft-dials-up-the-nagging-in-windows-calls-it-security-hbjayyakl) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why you can’t trust Privacy & Security](https://daily.dev/posts/why-you-can-t-trust-privacy-security-pnjrbhbzi) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#apple](https://daily.dev/tags/apple), [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy), [#mac](https://daily.dev/tags/mac) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7"},"datePublished":"2026-10-02T23:23:18.085Z","dateModified":"2026-10-09T07:46:33.960Z","description":"Apple announced upcoming changes to how Full Disk Access works on macOS, aiming to require more explicit user action before apps can gain this broad level of...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/b89caf7ab7be8ebeb088e12b14e4c055?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/b89caf7ab7be8ebeb088e12b14e4c055?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Lobsters","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Lobsters","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--tl8v_Fku--/f_auto,t_logo/v1698841318/logos/lobste.jpg","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"apple,privacy,mac","timeRequired":"PT1M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Lobsters","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/updates-to-full-disk-access-in-macos-occwt0mf7#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"Why is Apple changing how Full Disk Access works on macOS?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Apple is introducing additional controls because some developers use Full Disk Access to expose more than intended, including files, mail, messages, and browsing history, without users fully understanding the risk. 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