5 ms·

macOS Sequoia adds weekly permission prompt for screen recording apps

OptionOfT 2y ago
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?
- anakaine 2y ago
  I wonder when organisations will learn to lead and manage effectively instead of micromanaging time via screen captures.
- newdee 2y ago
  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.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    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."
    - kranner 2y ago
      This particular dialog doesn’t have a “don’t allow” button at least for now.
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    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.
    - newdee 2y ago
      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.
- ziml77 2y 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"
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    It at least does make it extremely clear to the employee that they are being watched.
tambourine_man 2y ago
I’ve had less and less incentive to upgrade every year for over a decade. I wonder when I’ll reach a tipping point.
- amatecha 2y ago
  I reached it so long ago. My most "up-to-date" Mac runs OS X 10.10. No intention to ever run anything newer.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    At some point Photoshop and Chrome stop working, then I’m mostly hamstrung.
  - therealmarv 2y ago
    Which makes you miss all sort of security updates (under the hood unlike the one mentioned in the article).
    - amatecha 2y ago
      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. :)
- ilikepi 2y ago
  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.
  - realityfactchex 2y ago
    > 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...
sonofhans 2y ago
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.
- skrrtww 2y ago
  > 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.
- dagmx 2y ago
  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.
skrrtww 2y ago
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.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  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?
  - lmpdev 2y ago
    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
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
zjp 2y ago
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.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  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.
  - Sophira 2y ago
    > 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.
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      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.
  - zjp 2y ago
    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.
preciousoo 2y ago
Sad to hear as someone currently building an app with screen recording capabilities. Hopefully the outrage is enough for them to reconsider
- theshrike79 2y ago
  It's a single dialog once per week. If your app is good enough, nobody will abandon it because of that.
  - preciousoo 2y ago
    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>)
wtznc 2y ago
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.
- dmz73 2y ago
  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.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  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...
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
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.
whazor 2y ago
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.
- ajdude 2y ago
  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
hasperdi 2y ago
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
- theshrike79 2y ago
  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
heavyset_go 2y ago
Will Apple's apps trigger the same weekly permission prompt?
jscheel 2y ago
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.

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?

anakaine 2y ago
I wonder when organisations will learn to lead and manage effectively instead of micromanaging time via screen captures.
newdee 2y ago
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.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  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."
  - kranner 2y ago
    This particular dialog doesn’t have a “don’t allow” button at least for now.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  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.
  - newdee 2y ago
    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.
ziml77 2y 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"
- Gigachad 2y ago
  It at least does make it extremely clear to the employee that they are being watched.

tambourine_man 2y ago

I’ve had less and less incentive to upgrade every year for over a decade. I wonder when I’ll reach a tipping point.

amatecha 2y ago
I reached it so long ago. My most "up-to-date" Mac runs OS X 10.10. No intention to ever run anything newer.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  At some point Photoshop and Chrome stop working, then I’m mostly hamstrung.
- therealmarv 2y ago
  Which makes you miss all sort of security updates (under the hood unlike the one mentioned in the article).
  - amatecha 2y ago
    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. :)
ilikepi 2y ago
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.
- realityfactchex 2y ago
  > 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...

sonofhans 2y ago

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.

skrrtww 2y ago
> 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.
dagmx 2y ago
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.

skrrtww 2y ago

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.

throwaway290 2y ago
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?
- lmpdev 2y ago
  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
- tambourine_man 2y ago

zjp 2y ago

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.

Gigachad 2y ago
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.
- Sophira 2y ago
  > 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.
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    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.
- zjp 2y ago
  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.

preciousoo 2y ago

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

theshrike79 2y ago
It's a single dialog once per week. If your app is good enough, nobody will abandon it because of that.
- preciousoo 2y ago
  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>)

wtznc 2y ago

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.

dmz73 2y ago
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.
BoredPositron 2y ago
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...

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

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.

whazor 2y ago

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.

ajdude 2y ago
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

hasperdi 2y ago

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

theshrike79 2y ago
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

heavyset_go 2y ago

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

jscheel 2y ago

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.