Recently, OpenAI shipped a plugin that lets ChatGPT read your Mac's Messages app, search it, and draft and send replies.
However, this feature essentially renders Apple's end-to-end encryption obsolete, because your messages are now sitting on OpenAI's servers in plaintext. The plugin needs Full Disk Access, Contacts and Automation. If you have Messages in iCloud switched on, that's potentially years of history, attachments and identities, plus every SMS 2FA code your iPhone forwards to your Mac.
OpenAI says it runs locally and doesn't build an index. Local execution isn't the same as local processing. The moment ChatGPT summarises a thread or drafts a reply using a hosted model, that content leaves the machine.
In 2025 a US court ordered OpenAI to preserve ChatGPT conversations for the NYT case, including ones people had deleted. Under the CLOUD Act, data in OpenAI's control is reachable by US legal process wherever it's stored, and they can be barred from telling you it happened.
Governments have spent a decade demanding a backdoor into iMessage and getting refused. This one installs itself, for free, with a toggle.
If you've enabled it, everyone who has ever texted you is in it, and none of them know.
Source
@Paul__Walsh:
paulfwalsh.substack.com/p/gi…