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points by michaelt 2 days ago | 0 comments

For the user's name it's intentional; they template it into the system prompt with no option to disable it.

For 99% of users, the model knows it's in the /home/joesmith/whatever repo and `git log` shows the last change was by `joe.smith@example.com` - trying to keep the user's identity secret from the model would be nigh-impossible so I think anthropic gave up on even trying.

[–] hyperhello 2 days ago

But that still doesn't answer the question of why Claude passes the info to web sites. What if it finds your banking information in a personal file and uses it to achieve its goal, which is not different technically?

[–] CharlieDigital 2 days ago

Haven't read the details, but is this because of prompt injection when CC reads the site?

[–] tempaccount420 2 days ago

Some websites will return an error if you send a request to them without a User-Agent - for example, crates.io does this. Curl doesn't send a User-Agent by default.

Then, your agent invents a User-Agent and it sometimes invents one with your email in it.

It doesn't even require prompt injection or a failed request, it might be in the agent's pretraining knowledge that a given website requires a user-agent.

[–] j45 2 days ago

I don't care that it sometimes invents one - it should never do something so ridiculous

[–] krapp 2 days ago

Why not?

It's just doing what it's supposed to do, analyzing the statistical patterns of a natural language prompt and matching it to a likely response.

What's ridiculous is an assumption that it "it should never do something so ridiculous" as if an LLM is a person who understands what that word means in any context other than next-token prediction.

[–] j45 2 days ago

Asking a non-deterministic machine to act like it's deterministic is never a good idea.

Where Claude Code has supposed boundaries between deterministic and non-deterministic tasks and flags.. generally.. it's unclear how much privacy has been a part of that and what implication that could have.

Hope that clarifies.

[–] caturopath 2 days ago

I use the name "Human" for that but it overrides with its knowledge of my name from other stuff quite regularly.

[–] TuxSH 2 days ago

> `git log` shows the last change was by `joe.smith@example.com`

GitHub offers noreply email addresses

[–] woopsn 2 days ago

You can absolutely remove an email from the context, at the model API it's tokens in tokens out.