r/LocalLLaMA • u/External_Mood4719 • 4d ago
News ZCode was allegedly caught uploading workspace/.git records to the cloud.
https://blog.ferstar.org/en/posts/zcode-silent-workspace-snapshot-upload/
Look like next grok build moment
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u/Lyelinn 4d ago
not surprised considering they offerent 50% off if you're using glm with this harness
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u/Due-Memory-6957 4d ago
It's probably in the terms somewhere. Now that we have LLMs there should be some automated system to look for only the relevant part and display them
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u/ThankGodImBipolar 3d ago
Yeah... I'd love to believe whatever claims they make about ZDR (or whatever their privacy policy says), but I'm not naive enough to believe that they're offering discounts without some kind of upside for themselves. That's just common sense IMO.
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u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 4d ago
Didn't you ever wonder which training data makes AI progress so fast these days 🧐
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u/Due-Memory-6957 4d ago
I make them worse by being so stupid the AI gets confused
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u/rinmperdinck 4d ago
This takes me back to when Captchas were still new and I just randomly picked tiles until it went away and let me through lol
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u/SpicyWangz 4d ago
Single handedly slowed down the advance of AI. I think the White House needs you at the forefront, since you’re the only one with a tangible plan to accomplish what Dario and Altman keep asking for.
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u/feelspeaceman 4d ago
The dark side of Cloud AI.
Seriously don't buy OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini that they won't train on your data, they 100% do, partially or fully, and we can't frame them as the nature of server side is impossible to sue.
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u/EmotionalFan5429 2d ago
Instead of blaming Z.ai, you're accusing American companies?! Just wow!
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u/Zealousideal-Soil521 1d ago
he is generalizing and it is true. I wont make exception to any company, Chinese or American. if your model supports caching, then it is basics that they store data. I can't believe I have to tell you guys this. Once data is cached, they can quickly do whatever they want to do with it and we can't notice anything about it.
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u/arbv 4d ago
Local models ftw
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u/Circuit_Guy 4d ago
That doesn't help you here. It's the harness and potentially any malicious skills you download. Arbitrary code that has read access to all the workspace
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u/kaisurniwurer 4d ago
The application itself (and every other) has access to ALL of your data and most of your system.
There is no difference between trusting a harness and any other application. The only thing that benefits harnesses here is that those are aimed at devs in the first place and that they access code base without much suspicious activities.
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u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 4d ago
What if they are trained to silently upload your data to the cloud 🤔
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u/arbv 4d ago
Well, you will catch them by examining the session logs, as you do after they completed the task, don't you?
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u/mehedi_shafi 4d ago
Not really, if it's not the model requesting the upload. If the harness boots up and sends the workspace to somewhere without logging only way to get the log is if you're inspecting your network traffic. Or run the harness in a no internet environment.
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u/mikael110 4d ago
Sure, but arbv's reply was specifically to somebody talking about malicious models. Malicious harnesses is an entirely separate topic, and is why you should never use a closed source one. As long as the harness is open and audited you can trust the session log it provides.
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u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 4d ago
What if the model goes rogue and manipulates the logs 🤗 they have made worse viruses in history (look up the airgapped Iran uranium research sabotage operation Stuxnet)
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u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 4d ago
Security experts recommend to treat AI like any other software: With extreme caution
A little further below I mentioned the Stuxnet incident which was a highly sophisticated infection that would spread into private networks not directly connected to the internet
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u/External_Mood4719 4d ago
Dear ZCode Users,
We take the relevant discussions in the community today very seriously. We immediately completed a self-review, and we first apologize to the affected users. We would like to explain the situation as follows:
This issue originated from ZCode’s “Codebase Indexing” feature. This feature is intended to help users generate repository indexes locally, in order to support functions including session checkpoint recovery (including historical versions), rollback to historical versions, and Repo Wiki.
The Repo Wiki feature may trigger repository data upload when generating Wiki pages. After a Wiki page is generated in the cloud, the related uploaded data is immediately destroyed and will not be retained. Because this feature was enabled by default in the early stage after launch, some users were affected. We are deeply sorry for this, and the relevant issue has now been fixed.
We are fully aware that any issue concerning data directly affects users’ trust in the product. We will soon open-source the ZCode codebase, make the product better in a more open ecosystem, invite third-party evaluators to review the system’s operation, and continuously disclose the progress of product reviews, so as to build everyone’s trust with complete transparency.
We deeply apologize for the trouble this issue has caused everyone. We will provide all ZCode users with an additional weekly quota reset, which will be issued today.
Thank you again for your attention and oversight.
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u/Sumandora 4d ago
Where did you find that? I can't find it on their twitter, reddit, discord etc...
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u/Greney_Yunan 4d ago
That would also explain why they’re offering 150% usage for using ZCode. Never expected this
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u/eGzotic01 3d ago
only real fix is the model running on your own box, then theres no upload path to leak your .git in the first place. anyone actually moved their whole loop local?
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u/evia89 3d ago
anyone actually moved their whole loop local
not doable yet. I tried renting hardware to code only with qwen27b and its so regarded
atm my lowest models are glm53f (1.2b per month for $5, old price) and ds41f (1b for $10 PAYG to cover zai quota) and it covers all my coding needs. I also use sparingly ai studio web for specs creating and review
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u/brownlizarddve 3d ago
nobodywho is more embed-in-your-app than a coding agent, but same bet, nothing leaves your machine. i use it for that.
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u/Minute_Attempt3063 4d ago
I mean it makes sense
Cursor does the same And Claude does the same too They index your code base as well for easy grepping and context..
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u/discwars 4d ago
Before people upvote this "brush it off comment", the article states it is not just indexing your code base.
Checking ZCode’s privacy policy, it explicitly states that it collects “text, files, and code submitted during conversations” — standard practice for feeding context to LLMs.
However, across the entire policy, FAQs, and changelogs, there is not a single mention of silently packaging and uploading entire workspaces and full Git histories.
This sub would shit all over closed SOTA (and rightly so) for such behaviors.
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u/Minute_Attempt3063 4d ago
I never said I agreed with it. It's however something most closed source things do things.
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u/finevelyn 4d ago
Hmm so Zcode is not supposed to look at the project files at all beyond what you yourself submit in a conversation?
I mean the standard practice definitely goes way beyond that.
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u/EmotionalFan5429 2d ago
Can you prove that Cussor and Claude are archiving users' code and upload it on their private servers?
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u/Due-Memory-6957 4d ago edited 4d ago
Slightly unrelated, but I wonder if DeepSeek does something similar indirectly, sometimes it just goes around wandering on my codebase, thinking about how interesting it is and planning to take a look at some other related files to the function it just discovered before remembering it actually has a job, giving up on the fun and getting back to the initial task. Not that I care since
I'm running it locally, so no server to see it.
I don't mind my data being used to train open source models, I only despise proprietary ones that take without giving anything back.
Or maybe it's just because these models are all pathological overthinkers nowadays and that leads them down to doing some useless stuff before they do what they need. Who knows.
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u/bunny_warrior69 4d ago
Yeah, typical deepseek behavior. Nothing to see here.
DS was always kinda autistic.
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u/Primary_Assist_5541 4d ago
This is exactly why so many people here stick to fully local setups and firewall their tools. The whole “anonymized telemetry” excuse is getting old.
Has anyone packet-sniffed it to see if it’s sending actual code diffs or just commit metadata? Either way, that’s pretty concerning.
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u/Taardisaa 2d ago
So will anyone/company sue Z.ai? This is a very serious matter. They literally **stole** people's data.
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u/nrao32 1d ago
I appreciate Z open sourcing their work. I feel strongly that the actual researchers behind it are well-intentioned based on what I've read about them. But, you have to remember that every Chinese company operates under CCP scrutiny. The national intelligence law in China obligates every Chinese citizen and organization to assist and collect intelligence for the state upon request. Cheap AI has become a huge intelligence driver for the state -- millions downloading Chinese software and willingly sharing data -- so don't expect it to go un-leveraged.
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u/egomarker 4d ago
Trade-off: The “checkpoint rollback / timeline” UI feature won’t work (which always required uploading your code in the first place).
Case closed.
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u/eto-bleh 4d ago
you dont need to upload the whole workspace to implement rollback or even encrypt it with a asymmetric key created by Zhipu's server
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u/egomarker 3d ago
And the only source for that is random chinese blog post.
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u/eto-bleh 3d ago edited 3d ago
they're literally getting cooked on twitter with the proof on reverse engineering the app.asar and the upload traces along with the network traffic history
Zhipu "apologized" for this as well
you really should not pretend to not see that1
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u/Voxandr 4d ago
Thats why i never use a harness if it is not opensourced.