YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Unsurprisingly, Meta's new Muse AI agent blatantly ignores users permissions

62 points dkobia 59 minutes ago 11 comments

ParanoidShroom 33 minutes ago | parent

How is this possible? Apple messages are just free for anyone to read?

daishi55 25 minutes ago | parent

It’s not possible. User error lol

ryandrake 23 minutes ago | parent

At least on Unix-like systems, if it's free for you to read, then it's free for any process you run as you to read. Sure, macOS has grafted its own weird "permissions" layer on top of the existing OS level permissions, but at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you, with all the powers your user has.

This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.

Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.

graemep 12 minutes ago | parent

I do not know about all Unix like OSes, but Linux has sandboxes you can run as you main user. Not as safe as running as a separate user and sandboxing, or running in a VM, but reasonably solid.

> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.

Agreed, but what can you do about your OS vendor?

VCFundedGenYer 31 minutes ago | parent

I think what’s more alarming is the macOS nannying UAC-like toggles to block disk access and other “protections” are apparently all UX reducing flash and no actual functionality.

I’d argue this is a five alarm fire for macOS and Meta simply exploited it.

PaulHoule 10 minutes ago | parent

Personally that stuff drives me up the wall, it's the Mac wanting to become the iPhone and close off everything but the App Economy. They'll geofence XCode to the Bay Area or something so only "professionals" can develop software and eventually ban web browsers.

dec0dedab0de 4 minutes ago | parent

I think we need more granular permissions, and built in ways to trick apps into thinking they have permissions they do not.

jkingsman 31 minutes ago | parent

I'm no evangelist for LLM assistants, but this seems incredibly improbable and represents a failure of MacOS security if so. If full disk access isn't granted, Mac blocks it from the Downloads folder, to say nothing of actually sensitive paths. I would expect a far more likely case of an accidentally granted permission on another device or a permission that was on and then turned off.

Permissionless action is about to skyrocket as an issue, but this particular scenario strikes me as incredibly unlikely. Would be interested to know if Muse can provide more meaningful data provenance/logs.

Scanning iMessage dbs as a passive part of full disk access (and not a messages grant), if true, is a little sketchy, regardless.

bethekidyouwant 29 minutes ago | parent

How is this a story anybody who knows how a computer works knows this is nonsense.

lapcat 12 minutes ago | parent

> After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.

This is absolutely untrue, and impossible.

I haven't spoken directly with Aten, but I have second-hand information from someone who has spoken directly with Aten, and it turns out that he has two Macs and may have allowed Full Disk Access to Muse on one of them.

iamacyborg 4 minutes ago | parent

The story from Hunterbrook is also pretty crazy with Muse having much more access to Meta’s social graphs than I suspect most users would hope.

https://hntrbrk.com/breaking-news/muse-doxxing