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#access#user#app#agent#muse#macos#permissions#disk#run#data
Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
Even as a technical person, it's not trivial to sandbox agents correctly. The fact that an mis-clicked permission popup could give an agent unrestricted access to a user's disk is a massive risk vector in the hands of lay people who barely understand how any of this works.
So much of current security depends on the model of tying access control to a user account. A lot has to be re-thought in terms of how to grant access to an agent working on the user's behalf, in a way that doesn't make it completely useless, and also doesn't require every user to become a sysadmin managing fine-grained agent permissions manually.
I think the problem is that LLM providers are dis-incentivized from pursuing it because their ethos is gobbling up any and all data they can get.
> Oops, we accidentally yoinked your personal documents, photos, and videos and they’re now swimming in our model’s data ocean! We’re sorrrry, oh well let’s move on.
It’s up to the users to use tools that enforce security/privacy. Open source harnesses like pi.dev seem like a good path forward to me
I.e. if I have an agent running in a WASM sandbox with no access to the host system, I can't ask it to clean up my files. Same thing with things like giving an agent access to your email inbox: doing so allows the agent to provide utility, but it comes with risks, as the agent can delete important emails, or leak sensitive data.
I think a big part of the problem is, a lot of the systems we use and would like agents to help us with don't have a concept of separated roles with different levels of access which can be applied. A lot of times it's all or nothing.
And even when we do have fine-grained access control available, it's a pain in the ass to manage it. Like you can create a GitHub token with fine-grained access control to your repositories and make sure the agent only uses that one to connect, but it's a whole lot easier to use a broad-access token, or just let the agent use your own token, so lots of people will just end up doing that.
And I also like pi, but it's probably one of the worst in terms of sandboxing as it's yolo by default.
This is all amateur hour shenanigans.
For something like muse that's supposed to be a general-purpose assistant, how do you give it enough access to be useful, without giving it too much access, and creating unacceptable risks? And how do you do that in a way that's comprehensible the average Facebook user who's the target market of this product?
https://hntrbrk.com/breaking-news/muse-doxxing
I’d argue this is a five alarm fire for macOS and Meta simply exploited it.
Open your terminal app and run /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
This opens a normal-looking Firefox window, but it has whatever permissions you gave to the terminal, which likely has Full Disk Access.
It’s insane.
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.
This is not at all how it works on macOS, which is what is being discussed in the original post. There are a million different things that require per-app explicit opt-in permissions. This is a case of user error.
> 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?
Muse is not available in the macOS app store. Almost certainly because of the sandboxing requirements.
Is this a setting configured in Muse itself?
> It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host. When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.bAfter doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being off.
Is full disk access enforced on the OS side, or the app side? Like is this claiming MacOS security was breached by Muse somehow acting in spite of deliberately disabled access somehow?
Has this been reproduced / recorded?
The OS side.
> Has this been reproduced / recorded?
No.