Meta's respect is irrelevant, because macOS TCC prevents any and every app, including malware, from accessing your Messages database without Full Disk Access.
> he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages
That's what he said, but I would suggest that one person's memory is a lot more fallible than a longstanding operating system security feature.
How on earth, after literally decades of abusive behavior by meta, are you standing the straw man that maybe and based on your assumption the user is lying??
I said that Aten is misremembering. That's not the same as lying. We all misremember things.
I don't care about or trust Meta. In my blog post about the Muse first run experience, I said, "For testing I used a fresh VM, not signed in to my Apple Account, because of course I don’t trust Meta with any of my data!" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/10/2.html
What I do care about is truth and accuracy. My mistrust of Meta is not going to make me distort the truth. Muse cannot bypass macOS TCC, that's a simple truth.
I'm a macOS software developer. That's the reason for my interest in this story, the technical aspects of it.
No. What you're missing here is that Muse for Mac is a native, compiled, code signed, notarized app, with specified entitlements. It can't simply rewrite its own executable code, so it can't do whatever it wants. You can even reverse engineer the app. Muse looks in ~/Library/Messages for the messages database; this is actually hard-coded in the executable file. Whatever ideas the remote LLM may come up with cannot automatically be translated into instructions that are executed by the Mac app. That's not how it works.