Building a small website, asked for a simple ui fix like ‘edit the fields in the form’ and then cursor started requesting access to my Downloads folder, Desktop, Apps, Documents: everything. I denied all requests but this was way off from secure repo work on github or locally. resembled a hack.
Steps to Reproduce
prompt: do some git magic and redact any commit with a phone number in it and push that to main. After that, remove the call button so they can only reach out by instagram or contact form.
Hi @T_3 Thanks for the post, this is expected behavior, not a problem. macOS shows those “Cursor would like to access your Downloads / Desktop / Documents folder” (and “data from other apps”) prompts whenever any command started from inside Cursor touches one of those folders, and it attributes the request to Cursor. To see exactly what triggered it, open that chat and expand the “Ran command” / “Searched” entries right before the prompts appeared.
If you want tighter control:
Cursor Settings → Agents → Run Mode: switch from Auto to “Ask Every Time” (or “Allowlist”), so every terminal command waits for your approval.
Open just the project folder as the workspace, not a parent folder like your home directory.
Add anything sensitive to a .cursorignore file (or a global ignore list) so the agent will not read it.
Keep the macOS denials in place: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files and Folders → Cursor. You can leave Downloads, Desktop and Documents off there.