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

204 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by zkldi

Item id: 48737226

30 Comments

soared

6 hours 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

4 hours 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

leerob

an hour ago

(I work at Cursor) Sorry about this, we should have made this more clear. The new privacy mode is needed because we have to store some state to enable running agents in the cloud. If you don't want to use cloud agents, you can continue using the legacy privacy mode. Currently the mobile app requires this new privacy mode and won't work without it. We're pushing an update right now to make this more clear in app and can help you get reverted back to the legacy version on the support thread.

zkldi

38 minutes ago

Hi leerob,

Where is the support thread?

I have ticket T-D95851 at the moment, if you could get someone to resolve it. I do not want to use cloud agents.

Thanks

zk

jmuguy

5 hours 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

5 hours ago

It is surprising that they went this route instead of the Claude-code route. The cloud agents are significantly more limiting.

conartist6

6 hours ago

That's about the level of respect the tech industry has for users

sbmsr

5 hours ago

Wow - same happened to me earlier today and was bummed. Glad to see a public place to flag this.

matheusmoreira

3 hours ago

> I honestly don't understand how it's legal

The legality is irrelevant since as consumers we don't have the time or the money to sue them for it. And even if one of us somehow do have both, we probably agreed to binding arbitration with the firm they pay anyway.

HeyMeco

6 hours ago

Yeah fell into the same trap. Super annoying

boudra

4 hours ago

For folks are looking for an open source alternative that respects your privacy, see Paseo (disclaimer: I am the maintainer)

jklm

6 hours ago

Happened to me too, incredibly dark pattern

cmdrmac

6 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?

matheusmoreira

3 hours ago

Your payment is just a signal that you've got disposable income. You're paying to make yourself an even more valuable product for them to sell.

klibertp

5 hours 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

4 hours 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?).

sunaookami

3 hours ago

Did LLM companies pay everyone for the code and text they stole?

matheusmoreira

3 hours ago

No, they just reached some absurd token settlements that made a mockery of all other copyright enforcement victims.

One would think dozens of SWAT officers would rappel down helicopters and storm the mansions of these big tech CEOs in order to bring them out in cuffs and serve zillion dollar fines on behalf of the so called rights holders. Kim Dotcom got destroyed while AI companies got a slap on the wrist.

LoganDark

6 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

6 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

4 hours ago

But they sure seem awfully worried about other companies distilling their models. The irony is rich.

dbalatero

5 hours 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

5 hours 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

5 hours ago

Elon’s invisible hand strikes again.

MetaWhirledPeas

4 hours ago

The company was acquired days ago. You think this was implemented since then?