One of the most confusing changes in Catalina’s privacy protection are the new locations which are now protected, including ~/Documents and removable storage. This is because macOS uses complex mechanisms to minimise the impact on users, particularly to avoid consent dialogs. To explain these, Apple uses the concept of user intent.
When an app decides it wants to access your camera, or to look through the cookies stored by Safari, you may have initiated that yourself and be fully aware of the request, but more often than not you aren’t. In those circumstances, macOS has to presume that you’re not fully aware of what the app has requested, and you’re prompted to give your consent in a dialog which should contain custom text explaining why this is needed by the app.
When apps come to read and write files, the situation is different. In the great majority of cases, you are in control of what is happening, expressing your intent explicitly through a standard Open or Save File dialog. Adding any form of consent dialog to that would be absurd.
But there are occasions when apps and other software work in and through folders which contain many personal documents, like ~/Documents, and could for instance be harvesting content from them without our knowledge.
Read more at EclecticLight.co