Simply go to Security and Privacy and turn the permission on then back off :)

What happens here is the UI displaying the permission state is buggy, but the permission actually works. It's just hard to see its state.

Buggy UI, modern Apple...

By the way there is another problem with that UI. The checkbox is blue when on and grey when off... but only when the window has focus. When the window is not focused it's grey in both cases. Different greys but still greys. And if you don't spend all day looking at checkboxes in Mac OS, you may forget if left or right is on.

And this is on Sequoia not <the low contrast update>.

Edit: I wonder if a reboot would also make security and privacy read the status properly. But it would ruin my uptime, so I'll let someone who has an OS update to install check :)

Edit 2: And I just noticed. I have a TB drive hanging off my Mac Mini and my games are on it. So there's a bunch of games in security and privacy (mostly crossover entries, but also for example euro truck simulator which is native) because they requested access to "removable volumes". No shit, they're installed on said removable volume.

> only way you can protect your Documents folder from access by Insent is to run the following command in Terminal: tccutil reset All co.eclecticlight.Insent then restart your Mac

I personally think the traditional *nix model has served us quite well, and elective sandboxing using containers (à la Docker and so on) is quite good. The Mac sandbox model is probably ok for most normal users, but for power users is infuriating at times. Multiple restarts of Mac and various processes (and when you realize not enough scopes have been granted, another subsequent restart). I think Mac forcing all users into its sandbox system has been one of my least favorite impacts since upgrading macOS, leading to the enshittification of macOS.

The craziest thing is background processes started by Terminal/iTerm (such as tmux) can inherit Terminal or iTerm’s elevated status even when Terminal or iTerm are no longer running, dead, or killed. So you’ll have a bunch of elevated processes without the elevated parent or grandparent process running—it makes me feel the whole permissions scheme is more performative than actually useful.

As a precaution would it be a good idea to run that reset command for all apps?

I go into "Privacy & Security", "Full Disk Access". A bunch of apps added themselves in there (Anki, Fission, Microsoft Autoupdate, WhatsApp), the toggle is disabled and I've never enabled it. Ok, whatever.

But when I go into "Files & Folders", and under those apps I see "Full Disk Access" in gray. Apps that have Full Disk Access toggled on look identical, with "Full Disk Access" in gray. What the hell am I supposed to make of that?

Is it a bug? Do they have full disk access? Is the UI trying to imply that those apps are solely controlled by the FullDisk toggle and are ineligible to request granular permissions for Desktop/Documents? Or that they are eligible, but haven't requested it? Or maybe they did request it, and I granted it, but I don't get to see it? Who knows?

It seems most likely that this is some kind of bug where that command or its underlying actions should be called every time the user unchecks something in the settings panel.

This is what we get when the iPhone’s permission system is grafted on top of a desktop OS that was never designed for it. I think they could have done something that is more Unix-like and yet friendly to the GUI end user.

Giving access to a file via the Open and Save panel is an explicit declaration of consent.

Because the panel is provided by OS itself, the app doesn't get access to the item until the user has selected a folder or file through that panel.

As if that's going to happen.

We've been building something in this space — Cifer Security uses ML-KEM (post-quantum) for key encapsulation and Poseidon hashing, with Groth16 proofs for verifiability. The server is intentionally blind to what it's storing.

The macOS permission model is theater if the app itself isn't zero-knowledge. Privacy can't rely on UI toggles — it has to be cryptographic.

But sure, if I was assigned to make an all-purpose desktop operating system today from scratch, I would likely do this differently, but along with a bunch of other things I think (and the app would have to be implemented differently too).

IMHO where it really needs to be protected from when iCloud suddenly starts grabbing everything w/o the user's permission to upload it to some random Apple servers.