If your terminal emulator supports it, it will see the trigger sequence emitted and start the modem protocol over your ssh connection and save the file.
Since it runs over your current ssh connection it's perfectly secure.
It's so much easier then switching to a local terminal to use scp to get or put a local file. Sure, I know it's not the most efficient protocol but with the speed of todays networks the kind of files you're dealing with when doing administration or development are more quickly transferred by not having to do the context switch.
If there's a mac terminal that will do scp that has shell integration on the host. I'd switch to that, but I haven't found one. Is there?