Jason Snell on Six Colors: Apple’s permissions features are out of balance

But what Apple’s testing in the latest macOS Sequoia betas is brutal because there’s no end to it. It’s a subscription you didn’t buy and can’t cancel. Yesterday, I was prompted to give temporary permission by an app that I’ve used since the 1990s to read my screen. Apparently, if I want to use that app, I will just need to keep approving it every so often. Numerous other screen-reading utilities may also be affected.

As someone who has been daily driving Sequoia for the past 2 months, I can say emphatically that this new alert is maddening. The issue isn’t that one app shows you alerts, it’s that you may very well have a large number of apps that do something like this, and they all show alerts regularly.

Let’s say you’re a relatively average office worker on a work-issued laptop. You’re going to see this from your browser because it shares your screen in meetings, Loom will get one too, as will your password manager which needs to record your screen to scan 2FA QR codes, Slack will do it as well for your huddles, and it’s possible your company’s security software that lets them monitor what you’re doing will show it as well. This isn’t even getting into remotely power users like me who also get these notifications from Bartender and CleanShot and Screen Studio and ScreenFlow and Keyboard Maestro and Sim Daltonism…

Jason also says:

Some users will make bad decisions. That’s just reality. The wrong reaction is to take the decision out of every user’s hands to protect the ones who might do something stupid.

Is it good for apps to need special, explicit permission from the user to view the contents of their screen? Yes. Is it good to pester them forever for every single app from now until the heat death of the universe? Someone at Apple thinks so, but I emphatically disagree. Apple should try to avoid users giving apps too much access to their computer if they don’t understand what’s going on, but that shouldn’t mean punishing everyone who does know what they’re doing and is happy with the software choices they’ve made.

Seriously, let’s take CleanShot X as an example. This is an app that’s sole purpose is to take screenshots and video recordings of my computer. I bought it, I installed it, and I actively gave it permission to do this. The literal only reason this app is on my computer is to record my screen…macOS doesn’t need to remind me that it’s doing that on a regular basis.

Privacy and security are always a balancing act with user experience. 20 years ago Apple rightly roasted Windows for bombarding their users with annoying pop-ups, and they’d do the same to current macOS.