The dialogue box on my M3 macbook air says, “keeping data separate makes it easier to manage your privacy and security.” So I’m actually getting two different messages in the same dialogue box. One is asking for permission to access data from other apps, and the mac OS is apparently saying that’s a bad idea. I’ve been denying permission, but when I try to scan, AVG says it wants full access to my hard disk. Although it is still possible to scan my mac for viruses with AVG, but as always, I get these dire warning if I don’t upgrade, which I understand is just advertising. In any case, it’s a hassle getting this dialogue box everytime I log on, and I’m thinking I should delete AVG. For free virus protection, maybe Malwarebytes is enough?
Any antivirus is going to request access to the filesystem and other apps, so this is kind of expected and will be the case for any of them. The operating system likewise will warn you about giving that permission, since most apps do not require it for their functions and may have malicious intentions in doing so. That said, Avast/AVG had a spying scandal where they were found to have collected extremely granular details of user activity and sold it to advertisers. Bitdefender is probably the best antivirus for macOS.