You have your Apple Watch setup with the same Apple ID as your Mac. So a useful feature for Apple Watch users is the ability to approve things using your Apple Watch. So you can go and revoke or grant permission to a website later on. So it's one of the permissions now stored in Safari Preferences.
It asks if you really want to download a file from this site. Now there's also a new feature in Safari that gives you a prompt the first time you try to download something from a website. Now there's an extra layer of security to prevent that. This is critical because that's one of the primary ways that something like adware or malware will mess with your Mac. Also if an app wants to set something to run periodically on your Mac, it's called the cron tab, it has to ask permission for that too. You can revoke access to any app or if you accidentally didn't give access to an app where it's important you can give it access here. Even screen recordings and keyboard recording. Just go to Security & Privacy and you'll see a list of different things, under Privacy, like Locations of Files and Calendar contacts. You grant it and then you're set.īut you can always go back and control these permissions in System Preferences. So the first time you run an app it's going to ask permission. It also needs to ask permission for all sorts of things like access to Calendar, Contacts, etc. If it wants to access files on iCloud it's going to ask you and a whole bunch of other different locations.
If it wants to access files in your Documents folder it's going to ask you. Particularly it needs to ask permission if it's going to access files.
But now it has to ask permission for a lot of different things. Now on macOS Mojave an app already had to ask permission if it wanted to use the camera or the microphone. This sort of security has already been available for a little while on iPhones and iPads. So it makes stealing a Mac kind of useless because they can't do anything except maybe strip it for parts. It requires authentication through your Apple ID. Now you can already use Find My Mac or the Find My app in Catalina to erase the drive on a lost Mac or locate it.īut if somebody steals your Mac and it's running Catalina and has the T2 chip in it they won't actually be able to erase the Mac and reuse it without your permission.
Also the latest Mac Mini and the iMac Pro and soon it will be on all Macs. Activation Log involves a piece of hardware that's on some of the latest Macs, particularly the MacBooks. A lot of it is completely invisible to the typical Mac users. So a lot of what you get with macOS Catalina involves security. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. On this episode let's take a look at ten new security features in macOS Catalina. Check out 10 Ways macOS Catalina Makes Your Mac More Secure at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.