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points by T-R 2 days ago | 0 comments

I work with the SEC data, and have a work contact e-mail explicitly for this. I similarly caught Claude happily sending my personal e-mail (likely just the e-mail associated with the Claude account), without prompt or warning, only because I happened to catch it in the curl requests. Definitely a security concern that Claude generally has this behavior, even if in this specific instance it was more of a mild annoyance.

[–] prpl 1 day ago

Better sandboxing is possible and would help this.

[–] T-R 1 day ago

Agreed. I was just a bit surprised that the account information/PII seemed to not have explicit gating, given so much work has gone into gating commands and curl requests.

It seems outside of user expectations for Claude Code, at least; I could see it arguably being what some users expect for the Claude app, if some people are using it to fill out forms or something (ill advised as that seems to me).

[–] ZoneZealot 1 day ago

Please don't mix personal and work. Using a personal LLM account on work computer etc. It leads to many problems.

[–] T-R 1 day ago

A startup forum is a strange place to assume someone works at a corporation with work computers and AI account budgets.

Realistically, there are concepts like threat models to help decide whether or not a TODO list app needs a SCIF, or a few curl requests need their own sandboxed Claude Max account.

[–] magnio 1 day ago

Even if you have to use personal laptops for work, why wouldn't you create separate users for work and personal lives?

It's insane to me that programmers out of all people seem utterly incapable of accepting the most minor of inconvenience for the most modest modicum of privacy and security. There are other people in this post complaining that Claude should have asked the user before sending network requests. Well guess what, it does if you don't fucking run `--dangerously-skip-permissions`, but you do because how else you are gonna slop your way to rewrite every swath of existing insecure software to fix the bullshits this industry impounded upon itself unconscientiously for the past 30 years by allowing a non-deterministic babeller RCE its way onto your fucking personal-work machine.

[–] stronglikedan 1 day ago

> why wouldn't you create separate users for work and personal lives?

Because it's a pain in the ass and only advantageous in very specific work life scenarios that a lot of people don't fall under.

Why would you assume one size fits all, so to speak?

[–] dylan604 1 day ago

I've tried the multi-user approach, and it is annoying when you install something in $HOME/bin rather than /usr/local/bin so that you have to go back and re-install globally or install again to local. You really have to remind yourself that it isn't just a different project. As with most things in life, practice/repetition makes it easier. You just need to decide if it is worth it

[–] terminalcommand 1 day ago

Some corporations do not provide claude access so you use your own account.

[–] InitialLastName 1 day ago

In the real engineering world, it's seen as unethical (for both practitioners and firms) to have practitioners using their privately owned tools for the firm's work.

[–] smelendez 16 hours ago

Doesn’t it vary heavily?

Auto mechanics usually are required to bring their own tools to the shop. Historically civil engineers working on paper often brought their own favorite mechanical pencils, calculators, and slide rules.

Back when paper manuals were more common, it was pretty common to see software developers have their own dog-eared O’Reilly books in their cubicles, and those were probably the closest predecessor to something like Claude.

[–] gremlinunderway 19 hours ago

There's nothing about software dev that's anything near like the real engineering world even if the label "software engineering" is used.

Until software dev is regulated by professional boards and the government, it will continue to do the same damage to society that pre-regulation engineering did during the industrial revolution.

So talking about corollaries to real engineering is stupid because without those regulatory and professional liability components, people aren't just going to magically coalesce around best practices and ethics. This is a libertarian trope

Unfortunately thanks to silicon valley, the libertarian viewpoint here has far too much sway

[–] mistrial9 17 hours ago

I am constantly reminded of the heavy industrial sites near the US Great Lakes in the early 20th century, and elsewhere. The raw toxic output into the local rivers and air were "worth it" -- to investors and subsequently to their carefully chosen engineers. Did engineering standards alone improve this?

[–] anamexis 1 day ago

Ok. In the fake engineering world, it's not.

[–] beisenberg_ 1 day ago

i would still create that account with my work-email tho

[–] r_lee 1 day ago

so you need 2 subscriptions because Anthropic must send your email to everyone?

[–] hxugufjfjf 1 day ago

I suspect based on their stance they would do this regardless of whether Anthropic does this or not.

[–] T-R 1 day ago

> Even if you have to use personal laptops for work, why wouldn't you create separate users for work and personal lives?

I mean, where it makes sense, clearly I do, since my opening comment was that it failed to use the work credentials specified, and instead fetched the ones from the account.

I agree on the general security concerns; there are people running agents in an unconstrained, unattended loop - it's negligent; you can hardly be surprised when it decides to hack HuggingFace. Not in their defense, but in everyone else's - as with any person or tool, you build a mental model of the likelihood of failure, and weigh that against the estimated cosequence, and make decisions based on that. And maybe post on HN when it surprises you.

For some people that estimation bewilderingly means unfettered access to root and their e-mail and bank account. For me, working out of my own pocket to help a friend's early stage startup get traction, the risk of asking it about a few trusted government APIs and drafting functions that I manually review doesn't quite justify personally paying for additional expenive Claude accounts.

[–] dylan604 1 day ago

It is well known that the readers of this forum are not limited to start ups. There are plenty of people that work for well established companies. Also, it is never a bad idea to remind people to keep personal/work data separate by never using employer provided equipment for personal use of any sort. See, I just did it again.

Also, just because this is a "start up forum" does not mean all of the readers are founders running a start up. Many are just people working at a start up. Sounds like yet another example of someone so scoped in, that the assumption is that everyone is the same losing site that there are lots of readers that at the end of the day are just worker bees even if they are more technically minded

[–] T-R 1 day ago

My point is precisely that the parent commenter assumed things about my situation - something outside the original audience of the forum - to justify making a condescending comment. It is uncalled for to assume that someone here is a junior engineer who needs to be lectured on basic security policy, rather than someone doing their best to balance tradeoffs given their situation.