While both have privacy implications, I'd rather we distinguish 'monitoring' that exfiltrates your data to their servers, and offline-only 'monitoring', used only for legitimate, benign purposes of the program itself.
Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
31–40 of 175 posts
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought you had to give explicit permission for an app to monitor network traffic in macOS? I'm assuming your app asks for this, but it sounds like Notion does not if the GP was surprised by the monitoring.
My Notion install (macOS) asked to discover devices on my network. I'm assuming this permission is related to "monitoring network traffic".
That's interesting. Although I wasn't able to find any confirming info that allowing the "locate local devices" permissions allows for network monitoring. It seems to only allow Bonjour and multicast DNS. Anyone know for sure what it allows?
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#33This is an unintended benefit of being on a Linux workstation - the only client available is the browser.
Notion and all these kinds of apps are available for Linux. But yeah, I don't recommend using them. Just use them in the browser.
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought you had to give explicit permission for an app to monitor network traffic in macOS? I'm assuming your app asks for this, but it sounds like Notion does not if the GP was surprised by the monitoring.
My Notion install (macOS) asked to discover devices on my network. I'm assuming this permission is related to "monitoring network traffic".
No, that’s the new "Local Network" prompt which started appearing since macOS 15.
Any app that opens a multicast/broadcast socket (mDNS, SSDP, WebRTC ICE, etc.) now has to ask. Electron apps (including Notion) do this by default, so you see this dialog.
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Notion install (macOS) asked to discover devices on my network. I'm assuming this permission is related to "monitoring network traffic".
That's interesting. Although I wasn't able to find any confirming info that allowing the "locate local devices" permissions allows for network monitoring. It seems to only allow Bonjour and multicast DNS. Anyone know for sure what it allows?
This would certainly be news to me as well. Packet capture (even local) has historically required superuser perms, but I'm not up to speed on how MacOS permissions work in this regard since the launch of System/Network Extensions.
After writing the above, I've just reviewed [0] - as much as I could in 5 minutes - and as far as I can tell it confirms our understanding. To do packet filtering or interception or reading, you'd need to do [1].
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3179-u...
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/NetworkExtension/c...
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#36I’ve come to hate Notion with passion because of its abysmal performance, but I still pay for it for my small business. My non-technical employees use it as a database for clients, tasks, payments etc. I tried to research replacements several times, and still haven’t found anything good. Sometimes I wonder if I should build my own.
The performance really is abysmal. I started using it years ago and the change from the early days has been drastic.
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#37I’ve come to hate Notion with passion because of its abysmal performance, but I still pay for it for my small business. My non-technical employees use it as a database for clients, tasks, payments etc. I tried to research replacements several times, and still haven’t found anything good. Sometimes I wonder if I should build my own.
I used a lot for organizing my personal projects, endup changing to Microsoft Loop for client stuff. And Obsidian for personal stuff.
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought you had to give explicit permission for an app to monitor network traffic in macOS? I'm assuming your app asks for this, but it sounds like Notion does not if the GP was surprised by the monitoring.
You don't need to give any explicit permissions for the snapshot of current sockets.
Yeah, non-sandboxed apps can iterate over open file descriptors. It's quite useful to detect eg. which app on your local machine is connecting over TCP. I hope they don't lock it down. It doesn't allow intercepting traffic, but you can see what connects where.
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#39This is an unintended benefit of being on a Linux workstation - the only client available is the browser.
If there's an app that started life in the browser, a desktop/native app can only make it worse. I don't use native apps for Youtube, Amazon, Slack etc for this purpose.
Re: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
#40If anyone is looking for an alternative to Notion without the bloat, I’m building https://docmost.com . It has a nice UI, real-time collaboration, diagrams support and more. You can self-host it too.
Very cool. I wish tools like this could be embeddable. For example, being able to add it into existing apps.
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