Tell HN: Installing Cursor on iOS irreversibly changes your privacy settings

147 points | by zkldi 2 hours ago

11 comments

  • soared 1 hour ago
    That support quote is from an LLM. If you have any escalation paths (twitter, or this thread lol) there may still be a way to change it back.
    • nikanj 43 minutes ago
      Hacker News front page remains the one true support channel for all larger tech companies. The official channels stonewall you, but HN reaches people who can actually help
  • jmuguy 1 hour ago
    The mobile app is kind of pointless anyway, imo. It cannot start an agent session on your computer, it can only be "handed off" an existing session from your computer. I don't use Cloud Agents, because for some reason they can't connect to our Linear instance. So I was only interested in using the mobile app as a proxy for my home system.
    • LatticeAnimal 1 hour ago
      It is surprising that they went this route instead of the Claude-code route. The cloud agents are significantly more limiting.
  • conartist6 2 hours ago
    That's about the level of respect the tech industry has for users
  • boudra 44 minutes ago
    For folks are looking for an open source alternative that respects your privacy, see Paseo (disclaimer: I am the maintainer)
  • sbmsr 1 hour ago
    Wow - same happened to me earlier today and was bummed. Glad to see a public place to flag this.
  • cmdrmac 2 hours ago
    This bait-and-switch with privacy is what annoys me. I get that if the software was completely free, you are the product. But if I'm paying, why can I not have a privacy policy that actually benefits me - the user?
    • klibertp 1 hour ago
      You're probably not paying nearly enough? IDK, but pricing in tech is stretched on both ends (either way too cheap, or incredibly expensive) so much that it's hard to say anything for sure just because one is a "paying customer".
      • cmdrmac 1 minute ago
        Fair point. I'd add on that the company should explicitly spell out strong privacy as a feature then and charge more. Saying that "we won't use your data for training", but then not really meaning it is a bit disingenuous. How I interpret that statement may not necessarily align with the company (i.e., what kind of training?).
      • throw1234567891 1 hour ago
        > You're probably not paying nearly enough?

        What are the real prices then? What is the “privacy price”?

  • jklm 1 hour ago
    Happened to me too, incredibly dark pattern
  • HeyMeco 2 hours ago
    Yeah fell into the same trap. Super annoying
  • LoganDark 2 hours ago
    Similarly, the Claude app for iOS tries to force you through a mandatory onboarding where you're required to set your account name among other things. I've never needed this to use the CLI or the web app so I have no idea why they think they need it on iOS. There's seemingly no way to bypass this, so on iOS I've had to use Claude in Safari. Ridiculous.
  • sleepybrett 2 hours ago
    surprise! the ai companies that stole every conceivable copywritten work to train their models doesn't want you to be able to have any privacy either.
    • doublescoop 14 minutes ago
      But they sure seem awfully worried about other companies distilling their models. The irony is rich.
    • dbalatero 1 hour ago
      I suspect that while they prefer you to give up all your data, what's even more likely is they are moving fast and breaking things at a rate unseen before, and not enough conversation is happening in design phases where someone can flag that "Hey if you add this new prompt it might break an important user contract you forgot about."

      In either case annoying still.

      • sleepybrett 1 hour ago
        just another line in the context. 'Make sure the customers have at least the same level of privacy protection that they currently have.'
  • rekttrader 1 hour ago
    Elon’s invisible hand strikes again.
    • MetaWhirledPeas 31 minutes ago
      The company was acquired days ago. You think this was implemented since then?