| I think the comments in this thread are a little unhinged, and it's making me concerned about the sincerity and knowledge of the average commenter here. The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden. There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition). I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff. Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too. In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard? I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.) I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for. |