Discussion
Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop
timfsu: I might call it a few different things, but spyware seems disingenuous until we learn that it’s actually spying…
Nevin1901: But that won't fit the narrative that Antrhopic is an evil company nickel and diming their users...
bpodgursky: You should not install Claude Desktop or Claude Code unless you trust Anthropic. You either trust them to be a responsible custodian of your compute environment or you don't.I mean it almost doesn't matter what is installed at any given time, the agent is going to install stuff you can't realistically observe, the software will auto-update, there is simply no way you can be sure spyware won't end up on your computer.
xfactorial: Having faith on a for-profit organization about doing the right thing, with access to your computer and the things you do on it, may be a bit too much.It was always quite a simple thing to do: “disclosure”. Explain me, in plain English, the things you are going to do when I install your software: do not bury it on a 40-page EULA with multiple amendments referring to different aspects that affect me and for which I would probably need a lawyer, or their very service to understand it, and that is of course subject to be changed at any time they feel.It’s 2026 and they keep on nagging it: even Apple stopped doing the little summary at the beginning of the “Accept the New Terms” where they explained, in plain English, what those changes were.And every time they do that, it is always on their favor: you code and eat pizza, they have a 1000 dollar an hour group of lawyers, ironing the hell out of their legal terms to must accept to use their services.
ibash: That’s not spyware, that’s just how native messaging is designed to work. You have to put a manifest there if you want the native messaging to work later.
jimmydoe: I double Anthropic did this, as apparently people copy this manually and it's still not working :https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14616Of course if they actually did it, without your consent, that's really really bad.
_wire_: There greatest XSS hazard ever deployed. The genius of genAI is plying very specific abs deep individual data from users, in exchange for giving them others' published data, and building in the users' cloying utter dependency on the channels for exfiltration. And the same query system that makes prompts work is implicit to the datasets pilfered from users. This paradigm is fundamentally evil and once it matures will make Facebook's racket seem like kindergarten playground. Given that Facebook's egregious racket is so far away from mitigated by public that we can expect the service to die of its own causes before it's countermanded, the prospects for the hazards of genAI are truly dire.
dankwizard: What are you talking about
catcowcostume: As if we needed more evidence to corroborate that.
Trufa: Yes, very possibly bloatware fits it more, a shit pattern, and very dubious behavior but not necessarily spyware.
bpodgursky: I am not telling you what to do, I am saying that Claude Code and Claude Desktop are not "normal" pieces of software that you can install once and choose to upgrade or not. It's a semi-alive agentic daemon. This is not something you can firewall and upgrade once a quarter after reviewing the changelog.
