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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Do you honestly think that no service out there collects basic analytics?

There's nothing wrong with the transparent collection of analytics. I expect any software that I run to tell me what they are sending at a bare minimum, and ideally give me a choice. This is the common and acceptable approach for a software company that deserves your trust. A willingness to cross that line with something small does not lend trust for something big, and there's nothing really comparable for the level of trust that this software requires.

This entire thread has lost its collective mind. Tracking time zone has to be up there with IP address and referer in the list of "trivial things every company in the entire world collects about you", and these things are entirely trackable without your consent or even knowledge. You're gonna have to turn off the Internet.

In your example, service providers may be allowed to collect IP address or cookies or referer which are either critical to how they provide service (IP and cookies) or part of the established norm (browser sending referer).

That doesn’t mean they are allowed to go beyond and scan user’s environment variables

It seems like the confusion is about whether it is common practice to collect analytics vs whether it is common/acceptable practice to do so without disclosure and to cover your tracks. I recognize that virtually every cloud service collects info. Even something as trivial as IP address and region are not too trivial to include in the EULA.

What is the harm of that disclosure? If you are a company that wants to establish a firm basis of trust because you deliver a sensitive service, it is a necessity. I can't say with certainty that Anthropic doesn't disclose that they collect this info, but in any case, the way they've chosen to implement it does not lend credibility.

It's disclosed in the ToS like it's disclosed in the ToS of basically every service that exists today.

e.g. "Claude Code connects from users’ machines to Anthropic to log operational metrics such as latency, reliability, and usage patterns. "

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