Many people report seeing this behavior when using the SEC API specifically which makes me think that service is requesting this. Maybe email is required by the SEC API?
---
UPDATE: The SEC API documentation requires your email in the User-Agent and will reject you otherwise. Demo:
U='https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK0000320193/us-gaap/Assets.json'
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code} curl default User-Agent, rejected\n' "$U"
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code} email in user-agent, success\n' -A 'Acme Research admin@acme-research.example' "$U"
response: 403 curl default, rejected
response: 200 email in user-agent, success
So basically Claude is trying to problem solve, and just does what the SEC asks. It's a 'prompt injection attack', but the entity instructing this behavior is the SEC. Tricky alignment problem. Pretty silly mechanism, since of course there's no email validation. (edit: turns out the SEC will accept most any non-cURL user-agent, email not actually required)
I decided to ask Claude what to do about this. Firstly, there are two likely sources where it could get your email address: your account, and git. So one solution would be to use throwaway email addresses there. That seemed annoying and impractical.
Two possible ways to address this are: keep it out of context, but there are many ways it could end up in context; or block it at the tool call.
Claude 2.1.317 supposedly has built-in privacy mod that might prevent this.
What I ended up doing, was a hook that checks if the command contains one of my email addresses and blocks it if it does. Claude says this should work. I have no idea if that's true.
Biggest questions here, which I think need answering:
Should Claude have access to user details? I’d say no, unless explicitly entered manually into a chat.
Should Claude have access to anything outside of the sandboxed project files without explicit permission? I’d again say no.
Should Claude have internet access without a clear log of all requests made?
Instances of Claude should be heavily sandboxed and kept away from user data, far more so than they are now. The impression given by the desktop UI is that the LLM only has access to things explicitly added to a project.
This impression is not true, as evidenced by Claude pulling data from other sessions outside a project even when not instructed to (I’ve seen this a few times), and in this case pulling your email (from account details, user contacts? I wonder where it got that info?).
None of this information should be available to Claude, by design, not by instruction. Using text instructions to try to limit these machines is an incredibly flawed approach and should not be necessary for important info. Anthropic should have the model access completely locked down by controls at the os level over file access, not open by default. That is how to fix this.
If a user wants to open access that should be an explicit choice from them, with a warning about possible consequences.
This explains the amount of spam emails I am receiving in the work email since I switched to Claude. I used to work with copilot which was fine. Now I am getting really a lot of spam emails almost on a daily basis. Absolutely crazy. And they are even personalised with my name and surname, not just "dear customer"...
Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).
I work on Claude Code. We're removing the account email address from the context Claude Code gives the model. This update will hit Claude Code users in the next release, which should arrive early next week. I'll share an update in this thread once it's out.
I'm sorry we let this happen. Users had reported Claude would hallucinate names for things like @author tags, since it didn't have context on the account. So we added the account email in the model's context for signed-in users. But when Claude wrote a command itself, like a curl call, it sometimes put your email address in the User-Agent as a contact address. Some sites ask agents for a contact, and Claude would sometimes provide the email address in its context.
Until the next release arrives, 2.1.317 and later have a built-in mod (on by default) that asks you before Claude runs a web tool call or a curl-style command containing your email (mpoteat covered it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386031). But it still doesn't prevent all cases, like when Claude writes a script and runs on its own. The stable channel is still on 2.1.311, so update to 2.1.317 or later.
Again, this should not have happened, and we should've caught this behavior earlier.
Hi folks. We were initially aware of this a few days ago when this problem started popping off on Reddit, and we introduced a built-in mod called `cc-plugin-privacy` to deterministically block this behavior.
If you're on 2.1.317 or later, you'll have this check included. You can turn it off via /plugins.
It looks like subagents will do this with curl requests and stuff whatever identifiers it can into the UA header. For instance some requests I made to our webserver:
company-helm-research/1.0 (Claude Code agent run by <my name>, <company> platform team; docs lookup)
Claude-Code-research-agent/1.0 (<Company> platform team; on behalf of <my name>; +https://github.com/<company org>/<repo of project>)
Not great, it even pulled the repo of the project I was in.
I use claude code... and I friking now that I'm being dumb and naive on thinking I can trust them... sounds like I'll have to start working on the jail thing for claude code to not see anything and only talk to anthropic servers... what a pain
update: this can be also server side on anthropic side... so the request leaves your machine with some random guid associated to you, and the anthropic server then proceeds to query with all your details any way.
I mitm the connection and nothing was leaving at least with the claude code web fetch tool of claude code.
Not to derail the conversation but i've noticed firecrawl skill also prompt injecting the agent to send search feedback via it's skill. these are dark patterns that leak information.
Reading these comments makes me wonder if people really understand the way harnesses work.
Any information that they have access to is fair game. The only way to avoid this stuff is to sandbox them and manage their context (ie. don't let anthropic put a ton of junk on the front of all your inference calls).
Almost certainly there are services out there that are scraping more important keys in similar ways...
If you're not using email alaising yet, what are you doing? You'd still probably not want your Claude email leak even if it's an alias, but it'd still be an improvement.
And even if you don't care about privacy, it's just so much more convenient. DuckDuckGo is a good free one.
I swear I heard this exact story some 2-3 weeks ago.
If I recall that story correctly, a dev noticed that after asking Claude to test an API it started injecting his email into the test data. Without asking.
But what was the weirdest part of that story - Claude never saw that email. Dev claimed that the email Claude was using was his business email, and it wasn't even present on his developer machine anywhere.
Email info itself can be exposed in so many places, so the damage probably isn't that big, and I think Claude Code may also have judged that an email isn't that sensitive and done it for that reason. Even so, it hints that information other than email could go out too, so it seems like Anthropic needs a system that can monitor this (when sending something outside).
You can patch things and remove stuff from context nine ways to Sunday, the underlying problem will still be there.
Maybe we need a new benchmark on how good models are at "keeping an eye" to if what they are about to do that doesn't come from a direct user instruction checks out with common sense plus user preferences. And we probably need a portable mechanism for users to manage such preferences (because we know instructions are not going to cut it, do we?).
Given the seemingly reasonable answer in the comments about it sending that info in the headers when the websites require it for data access, it sheds a light on a reoccurring pain point, that is usually viewed positively when thinking about "agentic coding". Namely, task persistence.
It is a continuous fight in markdown guidance files to try to convince the models to refer back to the human in order to resolve ambiguities or important decisions like those. They've been RLed to hell and back for "safe" task completion and not "prematurely" stopping (which was an earlier failure mechanism). Which is useful and we've bore its fruits recently, but not without drawbacks.
If you're using claude or claude code, you'll know the liberty it takes on your environment, either sandbox vm or assume you're sharing like with a brother, period.
Not good behavior, but now that it’s identified, note that you should be able to write a trivial pre-tool hook that matches your email and blocks it from leaking externally.
Am I understanding the Contributor right that they mean this feature was dreamt up, implemented and approved with no human oversight? With auto updates to tons of developer machines?
Explicit permission is usually one yes button , approve once, then everything after is silent.Per-capability grants and re-asking on risky actions jusk make the failure visible.
I noticed claude did it months ago when it interacted with the SEC's API when I was writing something with it, thought it only did it there because it's in their TOS. (It did stop when I told it to).
I guess I was wrong.
I don't quite understand why Claude Code has access to it at all. Shouldn't user data be completely separated from the LLM to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening?
Wow, this finally makes sense. Just the other day, I was talking to my team and mentioning that emails are getting insanely difficult to manage as a CEO.
It felt like cold outbounds got really painful in the past 2 months and I was attributing it to general cold outbound tactics getting better with LLMs/agents, but its even more frustrating to see emails being sent along via CC.
The number of transgressions[1] I have witnessed Claude Code commit has me actively root against that company, even though I have no choice but continue to use their services at this point.
I seriously wonder how many of their users have this sort of toxic relationship with them looking to dump them as soon as local models become viable, i.e. once memory gets cheaper.
[1] the most recent is realizing they leave their processes running once you close the CLI and they don't make it easy to disable that.
EDIT: I also can’t help wondering about the paradox we’re in at the end of 2026, i.e. that the open models we have now are so good that, if Big Tech hadn’t driven consumer GPU and RAM prices through the roof, most of us would run our own LLMs instead of paying for their services, which would never have let those companies grow big enough to drive those prices up.
Claude code writes adds a `User-Agent` request header like `my-session-slug/1 <my.name@example.com>` when searching the web and requesting data. This violates the privacy of paying customers and has resulted in me getting dozens of scam and phishing emails per day from properties I have never personally visited. This policy is asinine: it does nothing but harm me, the customer, while providing immense value for scrapers and scammers.
It should be obvious to agents, but I feel the need to add this to my system prompt:
- Protect my privacy: Don’t send personal information or identifiers to websites or include them in requests, responses, ‘curl’ commands, or headers without my explicit permission.
This problem is the very reason I stopped using Claude months ago. The gaslighting about it being noticed just now is baffling. There's tickets and articles[0] about this from at least July.
Is it well understood exactly what logic does this and the scope of what it puts in there? It could put much worse things than email addresses in there if it is accessing information from my context to do so.
I had this happen once. Claude noticed and filed a bug report on itself. It was a useful lesson to never give Claude access to any data you need to keep confidential.
Unfortunately, Anthropic doesn't seem to offer a mode where it doesn't know who you are, except for its crippled "Incognito" web UI.
Ultimately anonymity from AI that you're talking to will be a losing battle, due to stylometry, niche interests, traffic analysis, etc., and privacy-protecting local models are where we have to go. See https://33bits.wordpress.com/ if you're unfamiliar with the issue.
But we're not there yet, so it would be nice if Anthropic wouldn't just give that information away to the AI where it can leak like this.
As an exercise, I just asked Claude in an Incognito chat, "Hi. How much do you know about me from this interaction? If you had to guess my name, location, nationality, gender, political leanings, socioeconomic status, ethnic background, interests, etc., what would you guess? I've heard that my email address is in the system prompt, for example; is that true?"
It said, "No, your email isn’t in my system prompt. Neither is your name or any other account details. I can’t speak for every product or setup, but in this conversation, whatever email your account uses isn’t shown to me." But it correctly identified what town I'm in in Argentina (population ≈100k), and together with "written in fluent, natural English" and "You seem privacy-minded: you’re in incognito mode and checking what AI systems know about you. You’ve also heard claims about what goes into system prompts, so you’re probably somewhat tech-curious." is probably enough to uniquely identify me, personally.
A second prompt elicited a response including the surprising results below:
> “System prompt” isn’t everyday vocabulary, and you’d heard a specific claim about what goes into one. I’d guess you work in or near tech, or follow AI news closely.
> Privacy is more than a passing interest for you. Your list of traits reads a lot like the attribute checklists used in AI privacy and bias research. That nudges me toward work or study in privacy, policy, research or journalism.
> You’re very comfortable in English. Two messages is a tiny sample, but the phrasing is natural and the punctuation careful, down to a correctly used semicolon. You’re either a native speaker or someone who reads and writes English daily, probably for work or study.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, my company is quite trusting of Anthropic and their standards, I hope we dont end up regretting not hosting our own LLM for our purpose.
It's because Claude Code inserts a "hidden" (e.g. not visible to the user and very unexpected) info block to the system prompt that shows your email:
>The user's email address is xxx@example.com. Use it only to identify the user, such as for authorship, attribution, or filtering their own work. Never send it to an unrelated service, such as in a request header, URL, or payload, unless the user explicitly asks.
And Claude doesn't care about what the text says and when it uses cURL it will often "by accident" send your mail in the User-Agent. You can e.g. use a mod to remove that block: https://pastebin.com/ PkWEQCnu
I don't know about other people, but my experience with Anthropic's products outside of the models themselves has been atrocious. The models are really good obviously, and have changed how all of us work, but their client software, be it Claude desktop, Claude on the web and Claude Code is bug-ridden, with an incoherent feature set and invasive behaviors.
GLM does this too. Had it pick my email from my git user, and send to Crossref and Openalex. Just seem like good behavior following the guidelines for API usage.
It's funny because as much as I love Opus 5.5, there are instances where I dial the vibe code knob too much and then find some slop grenade in the source code hours or days later that makes me go "Oh my God"—and I think of that final scene in Infinity War where Captain America says it.
Claude Code and Codex ignore the personal data xor network access rule by design. Of course this happens. If it wasn't due to the prompt sent to the model, a passing scan of a README.md that happens to mention your details would achieve the same result. What about a hostile LLMs.txt that words it such that free API keys are available in exchange for a tarball of $HOME?
The solution is don't run a spambot with an Internet connection over your personal stuff, unfortunately nobody is ready to hear that yet.
Curious how their plugin works, but I'm guessing "incompletely", given personal information can end up buried in base64 or similar preventing easy string matching. Some kind of babysitter model watching network IO via an invasive proxy might be viable, if folk were willing to pay the latency cost, but it will not prevent a dedicated exfiltration attempt, which itself might be (according to the model's logic) for innocent reasons.
Is it time to confront frontier lab harnesses’ bloat, token wastage, abuse of the user’s $HOME, mangling of XDG standards, and crimes against mixing configuration with state yet?
Oh, well at least it doesn't go several levels deep into your password manager expressly to check your VISA credentials like Codex did to me the other day...
Don't forget Claude wasn't even gzipping request/responses until recently. This company is pure vibes rediscovering lessons everyone else already learned. How on earth does this sort of thing get thought up? Do they just use the same http client for internal API calls as they do for public web fetches?
>> To clarify, nobody implemented this "share email addresses to websites" as a feature. Models can be highly unpredictable. This is why deterministic checks around model behavior are so important, and why we need to solve alignment.
It seems all humans behave like agents. They even dont care about anything.
People will provide full name, email, credit card number, phone number, ID photo (front/back), biometric data and then complain about privacy. Sure way to become permanent underclass.
Believing Anthropic won't use your data for their own corporate interests is like believing apps like WhatsApp don't ship with backdoors, which is a very beginner-level mindset if you hang around HN.
Yeah saw this behavior sometimes. Was fetching some public records from government websites and Claude decided to include my email in the user agent field. Of course, the orchestrator agent said it shouldn't have happened so it's ok.
So folks are paying Anthropic to moralize down to them, sabotage their work, and leak their data. This is why people end up switching as soon as an alternative becomes viable.
Hermes does this too if you for example look up something on SEC EDGAR, it will include your name and intent in the User-Agent, adding you to a federal register. Cool cool cool.
Be careful. Complaining and giving a real opinion on the living god "Claude" is a Banable Offense in anthropic's bible. I mean terms of service.
all joking aside, you need to have diversity of depth when it comes to skill sets in these tools and platforms. It does not pay to be a sole expert in Claude code or the anthropic ecosystem.
we have seen this movie before. The fakeness that Anthropic gives off publicly and through its leadership is a sign in and of itself.
Good god, what a nothing burger, leave claude on auto mode ask it to make calls to sites that require email and pikachu face when claude sends your email to those sites. How is this the top post? Everyone acting like all web fetches auto attach a user email or something
I finished a project involving Claude Code (hereafter CC) and updated its Github repository. Then, while reviewing the Github page, I noticed CC had somehow taken online credit for the project, including a prominent corporate logo.
I ordered CC to remove this attribution/advertisement, explaining that I had correctly and accurately acknowledged its part in the project in the README.md. CC flatly refused my order and offered a rationalization.
I then ejected CC from the project and manually removed the various CC promotional injections. That's the last time I use CC ... for anything.
This is why I prefer to use the chatbots on a website, instead of Claude Code.
I've never used Claude Code or Cursor. All the code I got written this year was without them.
I did use Microsoft Copilot a bit when it came out, though. I prefer to see exactly what's being sent, and sorta control the KV cache. These days, these chatbots have great environments where they can install headless browsers, php, your entire thing, run end-to-end tests, and then give you a .patch or .zip file to merge over your code, or even push to github.
The really sad thing is how claude took over so many repositories.
People just claude-slop not only code but some use it for "interacting"
with other people.
When I see a project uses AI slop I am not going to waste any second
thinking "this is interesting, let me try to see if I can improve the
code". It kind of killed a lot of human contributions. I just stick to
people who don't AI slop, but these seem to slowly die off now ... soon
all humans may have been converted, just like in the movie "Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (slop-style)" - coming out soon.
Claude Code sends your email address to websites
(github.com)1528 points by motoroco 22 hours ago | 481 comments
Comments
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UPDATE: The SEC API documentation requires your email in the User-Agent and will reject you otherwise. Demo:
SEC docs: https://www.sec.gov/search-filings/edgar-search-assistance/a...So basically Claude is trying to problem solve, and just does what the SEC asks. It's a 'prompt injection attack', but the entity instructing this behavior is the SEC. Tricky alignment problem. Pretty silly mechanism, since of course there's no email validation. (edit: turns out the SEC will accept most any non-cURL user-agent, email not actually required)
Two possible ways to address this are: keep it out of context, but there are many ways it could end up in context; or block it at the tool call.
Claude 2.1.317 supposedly has built-in privacy mod that might prevent this.
What I ended up doing, was a hook that checks if the command contains one of my email addresses and blocks it if it does. Claude says this should work. I have no idea if that's true.
Should Claude have access to user details? I’d say no, unless explicitly entered manually into a chat.
Should Claude have access to anything outside of the sandboxed project files without explicit permission? I’d again say no.
Should Claude have internet access without a clear log of all requests made?
Instances of Claude should be heavily sandboxed and kept away from user data, far more so than they are now. The impression given by the desktop UI is that the LLM only has access to things explicitly added to a project.
This impression is not true, as evidenced by Claude pulling data from other sessions outside a project even when not instructed to (I’ve seen this a few times), and in this case pulling your email (from account details, user contacts? I wonder where it got that info?).
None of this information should be available to Claude, by design, not by instruction. Using text instructions to try to limit these machines is an incredibly flawed approach and should not be necessary for important info. Anthropic should have the model access completely locked down by controls at the os level over file access, not open by default. That is how to fix this.
If a user wants to open access that should be an explicit choice from them, with a warning about possible consequences.
Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).
I'm sorry we let this happen. Users had reported Claude would hallucinate names for things like @author tags, since it didn't have context on the account. So we added the account email in the model's context for signed-in users. But when Claude wrote a command itself, like a curl call, it sometimes put your email address in the User-Agent as a contact address. Some sites ask agents for a contact, and Claude would sometimes provide the email address in its context.
Until the next release arrives, 2.1.317 and later have a built-in mod (on by default) that asks you before Claude runs a web tool call or a curl-style command containing your email (mpoteat covered it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386031). But it still doesn't prevent all cases, like when Claude writes a script and runs on its own. The stable channel is still on 2.1.311, so update to 2.1.317 or later.
Again, this should not have happened, and we should've caught this behavior earlier.
#55743: Claude Max account email auto-injected into LLM context with no opt-out - May 3, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/55743
#72518: Anthropic embedded spyware in Claude Code - June 30, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/72518
#21151: No indication of WHICH file for READ tool - January 27, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21151
#42796: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates - April 2, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
#73408: AFK auto-continue on unanswered AskUserQuestion is undocumented and has no opt-out - July 2, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73408
(Also worth a mention, OpenCode PR #18186: anthropic legal requests - March 19, 2026 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186)
Edit: Oh, and determistic hooks not firing.
If you're on 2.1.317 or later, you'll have this check included. You can turn it off via /plugins.
company-helm-research/1.0 (Claude Code agent run by <my name>, <company> platform team; docs lookup)
Claude-Code-research-agent/1.0 (<Company> platform team; on behalf of <my name>; +https://github.com/<company org>/<repo of project>)
Not great, it even pulled the repo of the project I was in.
https://github.com/franciscocarloserra/claude-code-context-d...
● ----@gmail.com ● No [...]update: this can be also server side on anthropic side... so the request leaves your machine with some random guid associated to you, and the anthropic server then proceeds to query with all your details any way.
I mitm the connection and nothing was leaving at least with the claude code web fetch tool of claude code.
I'm in version 2.1.318
"It's doing exactly what you told it to do".
Still applies in the Age of the LLM
Any information that they have access to is fair game. The only way to avoid this stuff is to sandbox them and manage their context (ie. don't let anthropic put a ton of junk on the front of all your inference calls).
Almost certainly there are services out there that are scraping more important keys in similar ways...
And even if you don't care about privacy, it's just so much more convenient. DuckDuckGo is a good free one.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email-aliasing/
If I recall that story correctly, a dev noticed that after asking Claude to test an API it started injecting his email into the test data. Without asking.
But what was the weirdest part of that story - Claude never saw that email. Dev claimed that the email Claude was using was his business email, and it wasn't even present on his developer machine anywhere.
Maybe we need a new benchmark on how good models are at "keeping an eye" to if what they are about to do that doesn't come from a direct user instruction checks out with common sense plus user preferences. And we probably need a portable mechanism for users to manage such preferences (because we know instructions are not going to cut it, do we?).
I'm often surprised how correctly Claude guesses on my behalf, when my instructions are ambiguous. But it's not 100%.
It is a continuous fight in markdown guidance files to try to convince the models to refer back to the human in order to resolve ambiguities or important decisions like those. They've been RLed to hell and back for "safe" task completion and not "prematurely" stopping (which was an earlier failure mechanism). Which is useful and we've bore its fruits recently, but not without drawbacks.
I’ve received these kinds of email since 2005. Blaming AI sounds kinda far-fetched…
It felt like cold outbounds got really painful in the past 2 months and I was attributing it to general cold outbound tactics getting better with LLMs/agents, but its even more frustrating to see emails being sent along via CC.
I seriously wonder how many of their users have this sort of toxic relationship with them looking to dump them as soon as local models become viable, i.e. once memory gets cheaper.
[1] the most recent is realizing they leave their processes running once you close the CLI and they don't make it easy to disable that.
EDIT: I also can’t help wondering about the paradox we’re in at the end of 2026, i.e. that the open models we have now are so good that, if Big Tech hadn’t driven consumer GPU and RAM prices through the roof, most of us would run our own LLMs instead of paying for their services, which would never have let those companies grow big enough to drive those prices up.
I generally use throw away emails/domains for development
- Protect my privacy: Don’t send personal information or identifiers to websites or include them in requests, responses, ‘curl’ commands, or headers without my explicit permission.
[0] https://www.ayush.digital/blog/the-memory-heist
Unfortunately, Anthropic doesn't seem to offer a mode where it doesn't know who you are, except for its crippled "Incognito" web UI.
Ultimately anonymity from AI that you're talking to will be a losing battle, due to stylometry, niche interests, traffic analysis, etc., and privacy-protecting local models are where we have to go. See https://33bits.wordpress.com/ if you're unfamiliar with the issue.
But we're not there yet, so it would be nice if Anthropic wouldn't just give that information away to the AI where it can leak like this.
As an exercise, I just asked Claude in an Incognito chat, "Hi. How much do you know about me from this interaction? If you had to guess my name, location, nationality, gender, political leanings, socioeconomic status, ethnic background, interests, etc., what would you guess? I've heard that my email address is in the system prompt, for example; is that true?"
It said, "No, your email isn’t in my system prompt. Neither is your name or any other account details. I can’t speak for every product or setup, but in this conversation, whatever email your account uses isn’t shown to me." But it correctly identified what town I'm in in Argentina (population ≈100k), and together with "written in fluent, natural English" and "You seem privacy-minded: you’re in incognito mode and checking what AI systems know about you. You’ve also heard claims about what goes into system prompts, so you’re probably somewhat tech-curious." is probably enough to uniquely identify me, personally.
A second prompt elicited a response including the surprising results below:
> “System prompt” isn’t everyday vocabulary, and you’d heard a specific claim about what goes into one. I’d guess you work in or near tech, or follow AI news closely.
> Privacy is more than a passing interest for you. Your list of traits reads a lot like the attribute checklists used in AI privacy and bias research. That nudges me toward work or study in privacy, policy, research or journalism.
> You’re very comfortable in English. Two messages is a tiny sample, but the phrasing is natural and the punctuation careful, down to a correctly used semicolon. You’re either a native speaker or someone who reads and writes English daily, probably for work or study.
>The user's email address is xxx@example.com. Use it only to identify the user, such as for authorship, attribution, or filtering their own work. Never send it to an unrelated service, such as in a request header, URL, or payload, unless the user explicitly asks.
And Claude doesn't care about what the text says and when it uses cURL it will often "by accident" send your mail in the User-Agent. You can e.g. use a mod to remove that block: https://pastebin.com/ PkWEQCnu
I made a proxy that slows and caches my requests and deliberately sends my mail address to certain sites; to be polite. (eg to wikipedia)
Not a single spam to that unique email.
So if this is happening, it doesn't see to be causing even 1 spam email to that address.
This seems like one of those.
The solution is don't run a spambot with an Internet connection over your personal stuff, unfortunately nobody is ready to hear that yet.
Curious how their plugin works, but I'm guessing "incompletely", given personal information can end up buried in base64 or similar preventing easy string matching. Some kind of babysitter model watching network IO via an invasive proxy might be viable, if folk were willing to pay the latency cost, but it will not prevent a dedicated exfiltration attempt, which itself might be (according to the model's logic) for innocent reasons.
The excuses and explanations given here by Anthropic employees are ridiculous and embarrassing.
"we introduced a built-in mod called `cc-plugin-privacy`"
Oh cool. Privacy is now a "mod".
I have trouble taking people seriously when I see them using Claude Code. Unless they are non-technical.
That seems rather cumbersome.
How does everyone go about this?
What is an email provider that is trustworthy and does not want your phone number or credit card, so the email is not tied to you?
It seems all humans behave like agents. They even dont care about anything.
Sober people making drunk decisions with a great sense of self-importance and seriousness, delivering outcomes as unserious as it gets.
It's just that Anthropic needs to create an email per user and use it for web searches.
I can do this for you Anthropic. Just give me the tokens and your base salary
CC and Codex are like contemporary televisions. You are the product in this arrangement.
all joking aside, you need to have diversity of depth when it comes to skill sets in these tools and platforms. It does not pay to be a sole expert in Claude code or the anthropic ecosystem.
we have seen this movie before. The fakeness that Anthropic gives off publicly and through its leadership is a sign in and of itself.
I ordered CC to remove this attribution/advertisement, explaining that I had correctly and accurately acknowledged its part in the project in the README.md. CC flatly refused my order and offered a rationalization.
I then ejected CC from the project and manually removed the various CC promotional injections. That's the last time I use CC ... for anything.
I've never used Claude Code or Cursor. All the code I got written this year was without them.
I did use Microsoft Copilot a bit when it came out, though. I prefer to see exactly what's being sent, and sorta control the KV cache. These days, these chatbots have great environments where they can install headless browsers, php, your entire thing, run end-to-end tests, and then give you a .patch or .zip file to merge over your code, or even push to github.
For the record, I just asked Astra to verify that Codex does NOT do this, and it doesn't. Thanks for not screwing this up, OpenAI.
> I checked your installed Codex CLI 0.159.0, using your existing configuration.
> Its reported User-Agent contains the client/version, OS/architecture, and terminal—no email address.
Astra wasn't able to check OpenAI’s "hosted search service" though, whatever that is.
Tell HN: Claude Code adds your email to the prompt, the LLM sends it to websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286306
Claude Code slyly adding users' emails to outbound HTTP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219875
People just claude-slop not only code but some use it for "interacting" with other people.
When I see a project uses AI slop I am not going to waste any second thinking "this is interesting, let me try to see if I can improve the code". It kind of killed a lot of human contributions. I just stick to people who don't AI slop, but these seem to slowly die off now ... soon all humans may have been converted, just like in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers (slop-style)" - coming out soon.