How to Stop Your MacBook From Harassing You About Permissions
Apple’s macOS Sequoia has several new features to improve security, and one of them is a prompt that forces you to constantly update screen recording permissions. Until now, you could permanently grant any app permission to record your screen and capture system audio, but Sequoia has changed this to a maximum of one month. Unfortunately, many applications cannot work at all without these permissions. While regularly checking your app’s permissions is a good security practice, it’s also annoying to have system-level reminders that you can’t turn off.
Why Apps Need Permissions to Record Your Mac’s Screen and Audio
Due to the design of macOS, apps must explicitly request access to capture the screen and record system audio, which in turn allows them to perform several useful tasks. For example, take the trusted Cleanshot X app. These permissions are required to take screenshots and record screens. Without these permissions, Cleanshot X won’t be able to capture anything from your Mac’s screen. This is an obvious example. However, many apps require this permission to change elements on your Mac’s screen, even some more unexpected ones. For example, a menu bar management application could use this permission to capture images of the menu bar and hide unnecessary icons.
Pros and cons of macOS Sequoia security reminders
When a trusted application uses these security permissions, you have nothing to worry about. However, there have been cases, such as in the case of Bartender , when control of the application changed hands and trust was lost. In these cases, many people may have stopped using the app but forgot or neglected to disable screen recording permissions. In such cases, a monthly reminder to check permits can help. This feature is especially useful on iOS, where you can quickly check whether certain apps need to continue to have access to your entire photo library or other permissions.
That being said, a security reminder pop-up disturbs your workflow and no one wants to deal with annoying pop-ups on a regular basis. Experienced users may not need these reminders at all, but there is currently no official way to turn them off. That’s where this guide comes in handy.
How to turn off macOS Sequoia security reminders using Terminal
The quickest way to turn off these security reminders is through the Terminal, as indie app developer Jeff Johnson wrote on his blog . First, you need to grant some security permissions to the Terminal app so that it can access the required file. To do this, click the Apple logo in the top left corner of your Mac screen and select System Preferences . Then go to Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access and click the + button. Now add the Terminal app to grant it this permission.
Now open Terminal and paste the following command to see which apps will display monthly security reminders:
defaults read ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.replayd/ScreenCaptureApprovals.plist
On my Mac, only Cleanshot X currently has this permission, so here’s the result I saw in Terminal:
{
"/Applications/CleanShot X.app/Contents/MacOS/CleanShot X" = "2024-09-26 11:26:41 +0000";
}
Use the following command to stop reminders for any app, for me it’s Cleanshot X:
defaults write ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.replayd/ScreenCaptureApprovals.plist "/Applications/Cleanshot X.app/Contents/MacOS/Cleanshot X" -date "2054-09-21 12:40:36 +0000"
The trick is to change the “end date” of the permit approval. I changed it to 2054, by which time I’m sure I’ll have more important things to worry about. Feel free to change the date to something in the distant future. Once you run this command, macOS will stop reminding you about permissions granted to that app. You can repeat these steps for other apps and get rid of these security prompts once and for all.
Please note that you do not need to disable these reminders for all apps. You can select just a few apps that you use every day and turn off reminders only for them.
There is an alternative to using the Terminal for this feature. An app called Amnesia lets you quickly turn off permission reminders on your Mac. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get it to work reliably on my Mac at the time of writing, but the developers seem to release updates frequently to fix existing issues.