Apple Curbs a macOS Permission It Says Developers Misused to Reach Message Histories
Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories. The announcement came two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said Meta's new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages — a conversation he had assumed was private and off-limits to the agent.
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Aten's account is that he never granted Muse permission to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. That's why the notification read as a violation rather than a convenience.
Meta CTO David Singleton's rebuttal was that Muse cannot reach Apple Messages without two manual grants: full-disk access at the macOS system level, and a Messages connector switched on inside Muse. On that account, both gates are opt-in.
Then there are two readings of the same event: a permission granted and forgotten, or a permission prompt that doesn't convey what it is really handing over. Only one of those is a user-education problem, and the other is a design problem.