Comment by _kush
5 days ago
They only check if your mic is on, not what you're saying (they can't hear you unless you've granted mic permission). They also look at your network traffic to see if audio is being sent (otherwise you can get a lot of false positives). Using mic + network data is a common way to spot meetings -- my app LookAway[0] does something similar to pause reminders during calls.
[0]: https://lookaway.app
I thought you had to give explicit permission for an app to monitor network traffic in macOS? I'm assuming your app asks for this, but it sounds like Notion does not if the GP was surprised by the monitoring.
My Notion install (macOS) asked to discover devices on my network. I'm assuming this permission is related to "monitoring network traffic".
No, that’s the new "Local Network" prompt which started appearing since macOS 15. Any app that opens a multicast/broadcast socket (mDNS, SSDP, WebRTC ICE, etc.) now has to ask. Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default, so you see this dialog.
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I think this has to do with Chromium x MacOS -- https://issues.chromium.org/issues/346505950
https://x.com/rauchg/status/1846590635677004039?s=46&t=kVfjh...
That's interesting. Although I wasn't able to find any confirming info that allowing the "locate local devices" permissions allows for network monitoring. It seems to only allow Bonjour and multicast DNS. Anyone know for sure what it allows?
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Yes, it would be that one
You don't need to give any explicit permissions for the snapshot of current sockets.
Yeah, non-sandboxed apps can iterate over open file descriptors. It's quite useful to detect eg. which app on your local machine is connecting over TCP. I hope they don't lock it down. It doesn't allow intercepting traffic, but you can see what connects where.