Mac Security · Mac Privacy Controls · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: The Free Screen Recorder

A free recorder asked for every permission. Help your uncle sort out his Mac.

Yes to everything

Your uncle Dev films cooking lessons for his neighbors. He wanted to record his screen while showing recipes, so he clicked an ad for "ClipCast Free" and installed it on his Mac.

"It asked a lot of questions," he says. "I just kept clicking Allow so it would work."

You open System Settings › Privacy & Security together. ClipCast shows up almost everywhere:

• Screen & System Audio Recording
• Microphone
• Camera
• Accessibility
• Input Monitoring
• Full Disk Access
• Location Services

Dev only wants to record his screen and his voice. He never uses the camera for these lessons.

Before you change anything, you sort the list into two piles: access a screen recorder might truly need, and access it has no reason to have.

A dot at the wrong time

While you talk, Dev isn't recording anything. ClipCast's window is closed. Yet a small dot glows just to the right of Control Center in the menu bar.

You click Control Center. The field at the top says ClipCast is using the microphone. It must still be running in the background.

Dev frowns. "So it's been listening even when I'm not filming?" He remembers seeing the same dot last night while he was on the phone with his doctor.

Taking it all back

Dev decides he doesn't trust ClipCast any more. A free app from an ad that listens when it shouldn't isn't worth keeping. He'll use the screen recording built into macOS instead.

You quit ClipCast first. Then you go through each list in Privacy & Security. You turn off its switches, and in lists like Accessibility and Full Disk Access you select it and click the minus button. You type Dev's Mac password when asked.

Finally you drag ClipCast from Applications to the Trash and empty it.

After a week of Input Monitoring

ClipCast had Input Monitoring for a whole week. That means it could have seen every key Dev typed, in any app.

Dev thinks back. That week he signed in to his bank and his email on this Mac.

You also check General › Login Items and General › Sharing for anything new. Everything there looks normal.

Now you need to protect the accounts he used.