Comment by layer8
14 hours ago
Yes, you need to read more carefully. In particular:
“8. Confirm that Documents access for Insent is still disabled in Files & Folders.
“9. Whatever you do now, the app retains full access to Documents, no matter what is shown or set in Files & Folders.”
[…]
“Access restrictions shown in Privacy & Security settings, specifically those to protected locations in Files & Folders, aren’t an accurate or trustworthy reflection of those that are actually applied. It’s possible for an app to have unrestricted access to one or more protected folders while its listing in Files & Folders shows it being blocked from access, or for it to have no entry at all in that list.”
"6. Click on Open from folder and select your Documents folder there. Confirm that works as expected and displays the name and contents of one of the text files in Documents."
It's because in step 6 the user explicitly selected the Documents folder.
The app can access the Documents folder because the user chose that directory in the native file browse dialog during the same run of the app. IMO that's a reasonable trade-off.
The problem is that this given permission doesn’t show in Files & Folders, and after turning it on and off there it still persists. The only way to revoke it is using some CLI command and restart the computer.
That's not what's happening here. Forget about the first 5 steps. If you install the app and start from step 6, the behaviour will be the same. If the user chooses the Documents folder in the browse window in an app, the app can use the contents of the Documents folder without the need for that permission in the Settings page.
The Privacy settings applies only to access to the Documents folder without the user interaction.
25 replies →
You “feed” it the document.
Same way you select a picture on iOS. It is your deliberate decision and intent to open the document with that application.
That is totally different from the application having permission to scan and view anything in for example the downloads folder
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> during the same run of the app
Is this part true? The article's fix involves running a command and rebooting the computer. If restarting the app was sufficient, surely you wouldn't need the command/reboot?
I guess not. Looks like if you choose the Documents directory once, you give your implicit permission to the app until you choose another restricted directory.
Screen time is swiss cheese as well, not surprised.
This is so typical for Apple software "quality". While a truly love some of the features Apple has put into my pocket, I am noticing since years that at least iOS is the first commercially sold platform where I sometimes have to press a boolean toggle twice to have it take effect. They seem to have a lot of bugs around UI synchronisation.