Well duh, the purpose of Privacy and Security was never Privacy or security. The purpose is to lock you into Apple's ecosystem and prevent you from installing your own software.

Great insight! Thanks for sharing.

> Once you have downloaded Insent

As if that's going to happen.

This is exactly why the security model matters. If the OS or app can access your data, so can anyone who compromises it. The only real solution is client-side encryption where the server NEVER sees plaintext — your keys stay on your device.

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.

I never used the ~/Documents folder. Lots of apps just trashed their stuff in there over the years making that folder entirely unusable for my actual document files. I would have to dig through the mess to find them. So I have to admit that I don't really understand the extra "care" Apple is doing to this particular folder. Same for the ~/Downloads folder: all my actual downloads go to some other disk, since the system disk is so small. Protecting this two folders would be entirely useless here.

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.

I was considering buying a mini Mac, but there wasn't a way to encrypt it fully with Veracrypt and in the case of Francis Rawls the feds got pass Apples vault encryption. With the recent iPhone notification storage revelation I don't trust Apple at all.

I think it is an acceptable quirk for a permission system that has been retrofitted on top of an ecosystem which was not designed with that threat model in mind.

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).