Solutions
Your messages, your mail, your photos.
The apps are helpful because they can act. The question nobody can answer offhand is what they are able to touch — and the honest answer on most machines is more than the owner expected.
A list you can actually read
Every assistant, extension and connector you have installed, and what each one can reach — files, messages, keys, the screen. Named for the app, in order of consequence.
Originals stay originals
Messages, Mail, Photos, keychains and SSH keys are not what an agent gets. A request that names one is held and you are asked, with the command it was about to run.
What it measures stays put
No sign-up, no upload, no telemetry. The scans, the history and the log are files in your own home folder. Agent Access, if you turn it on, is the part that reaches out.
The thing that actually goes wrong
Not someone breaking in. An assistant doing what you asked, against the live copy of something: opening the real message database to answer a question about it, acting on a sentence that was sitting in a screenshot, sending the right file to the wrong place. No prompt appears, because the permission was granted months ago.
Mockingbyrd scans for that shape, shows what it found with the evidence, and writes any fix as a script you read before it runs. Nothing changes until you approve it.
If you use a screen recorder or a message archive
Those stores are the sharpest version of the problem: they hold everything that was on screen or said near the machine, including other people who never agreed to any of it. The answer here is a narrowed read-only copy rather than access to the original, and audio is dropped from that copy at every setting. How the copy is built.
The one part that reaches out
Everything above reads files that are already on your device. Agent Access is the exception, and it is off until you switch it on: you link an account once, the sign-in stays in your Keychain, and an agent’s tool calls to that account go through a gateway on this machine that logs every one of them.
You do not need to be a developer
The app has an Intuitive mode that shows the findings, the fixes and the agents in ordinary words, and Nerd Mode for when you want the probe, the file and the line. The mode changes the vocabulary, not the score, and the score is there to be argued with rather than obeyed.