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A brief history of privacy protection on Macs


After years of limited controls, in Mojave (2018) Apple unleashed TCC and greatly enhanced privacy settings, that have come to dominate System Settings.

Four years later, in OS X 10.10 Yosemite (2015) and still in 10.12 Sierra (2017), those three items had grown to eight, with the addition of Calendars, Reminders, Accessibility, and two social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook. If they were built against 10.13 or earlier, then Mojave didn’t expect them to have support such as usage information, so it should have displayed a dialog inviting consent to the requested access. Two, discovered by Patrick Wardle and Jeff Johnson, weren’t disclosed, to allow Apple to address them, and the third, in ssh, wasn’t so much a vulnerability as a feature that could be exploited.

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