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Comment by digdigdag | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone jumps on a new text editor band wagon, just a note on the license they have you agree to in using it:

"Customer Data consisting of User content created while using the Solution is classified as "User Content". User Content is transmitted from Your environment only if You collaborate with other Zed users by electing to share a project in the Editor.

[...]Zed's access to such User Content is limited to debugging and making improvements to the Solution."

No commentary from me. Come to your own conclusions.

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I would like some commentary from you, sounds very reasonable to me, I don't understand what the problem is.

Of course if you choose to share your project with others for collaboration, the content of that project is transmitted from your machine, what else would you expect? How would it work otherwise?

I didn't get it at first, but as I read it the last "Zed" is not the editor but the company.

Basically the Zed company also gets access to the code you're sharing with other users.

In other words, “when you use our servers your data will be on our servers but we’ll only access it when we’re debugging our servers.”

“And improving our solution” so full access

“And when we suffer a data breach (sorry about that)”.

Exactly. So two people at work share a private session, then all user content of that session is directly accessible to Zed Industries.

Is that right? If I understand that correctly I think that’s going to be an instant no for a lot of people.

A lot of people use hosted git solutions. And even hosted databases!

Someone might even know some unencrypted platform called as GitHub.

I’d argue it’s not quite the same, since with hosted git you are being very explicit in both what you are sharing and who you are sharing with.

Neither of those things are the same here.

I misread the above comment it seems, however, my point was that for many it is not instant no, since so many buy space from GitHub et al. Probably most of the small companies.

They have already trust in place. Do they trust Zed too?

It'd be more appealing if user content was e2e encrypted during sessions.

This actually looks very reasonable...?

It’s not unreasonable.

The thing is every time you load company proprietary code and/or sensitive data you better make sure you don’t hit the share button as well.

Not the end of the world but also something we didn’t have to think about until recently. That pushing a button (other than delete) could potentially get you fired.

> make sure you don’t hit the share button

Are you concerned using email in general?

Because every-time you hit “send” sounds scary as well.

Joking aside, it seems fairly obvious that the risk is on you if your “share” your company’s sensitive code.

I don’t most consider these things anymore. How many signed up for copilot without a second thought?

^think

This question of who gets to see your company data is I think a lot more thorny these days than ever before.

You're joking about email, but that's of course the reason why companies will pay a lot to host email on premise instead of relying on cheaper offsite solutions. I think Exchange Server is Microsoft's biggest foot in the door to access conpanies tbat otherwise wouldn't care much about the other Microsoft services.

Having a third party look at every email you're sending around is just a non starter for many businesses.

Getting the same setting in an editor where your code is shared with the editor company everytime you want to show it to a colleague is not trivial at all.

Not at all. Very reasonable would be if they asked you:

- Only if you explicitly consent we will store your code or parts of your code on our servers.

- Only if you explicitly consent we will read your code for improving our product.

- Otherwise your code will never be stored on our servers. Data may reside in memory during sessions, but will never be stored.

The issue is that you when using Zed you implicitly agree that they store and use your code the moment you use the flagship feature of the editor.

It's their product, they can do whatever they want. But this behavior is a big red flag for me.

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