I've been wondering about this -- I'm making a text editor RPG, and in the medium term I want to make a file picker that builds a procedural dungeon based on your file system. I know such a thing would have been trivially fine in older versions of windows, but I didn't know if going down that road has any foot guns a more educated win developer would know.

Is protected folder access an on-by-default thing, or is it only certain folders?

Quick googling makes me think my plan might trigger windows defender for an exemption request. Hm That's a drag, but understandable I suppose?

You'd trigger Windows Defender's "Controlled Folder Access" only if the user has it on (it's still off by default IIRC due to many, many false positives) and only for write operations. By iterating every file you may trigger its "this might be ransomware" flag but you'll only be stopped when you try to write to a protected folder. (Which is only Documents, Pictures & Videos by default)

But honestly, I've had to whitelist Microsoft's own Windows utilities from CFA in its earlier days, so don't fret about it.

Thank you. I'm deliberately going to be readonly (and most likely only filenames unless the user requests contents) When I'm walking around the filesystem.

Thank you for the info.