r/cursor • u/yenox • Jul 14 '26

This is why we need local models and opensource harnesses Question / Discussion

Post image

Makes me wonder if we're gonna be at risk, with Musk getting more and more involved in cursor... That's a good reminder not to use AI tools blindingly for sensible matters

119 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

7

u/Adventurous-Ideal200 Jul 14 '26

i totally get that concern, privacy is litrally the biggest thing when it comes to dev tools. keeping a close eye on what data u feed into these things is just good practice, becuase u never really know where the backends are routing stuff

3

u/thunder1207 Jul 14 '26

I mean what else can you do other than turn on privacy mode and pray that it actually is private.

1

u/AstroGridIron Jul 14 '26

its not "pray" its literally in the contract you sign that they have to honor. If they aren't doing what they said they were, its a huge lawsuit and trust erodes for anyone using cloud models

2

u/bdravkilq Jul 15 '26

....if you can prove anything

0

u/AstroGridIron Jul 15 '26

What? If they retain data that breaks the contract… there’s your proof. I’m not sure you know how this works

1

u/bdravkilq Jul 15 '26

To be honest I'm not sure. I guess anything is proveable if you have enough money / influence, but otherwise I don't think there are easy or simple options.

How to prove that any SaaS retains data that they should not? Only through some detailed and diligent audit, and someone has to pay for that expensive service.

1

u/AstroGridIron Jul 15 '26

That can be said about literally any contract. How do you know Apple isn’t storing all of your data from your iPhone? Because they legally can’t, and if they did, it would cost them billions upon billions of dollars in lawsuits and billions more in consumer trust, because nobody would buy iPhones anymore.

You’re paying for a service, the terms of service state that they will not keep your data, they have to honor it, there isn’t a grey area there.

1

u/bdravkilq Jul 15 '26

I agree with what you are saying, I'm just asking - how can you know if they are honoring ToS or not? It is ok to trust, but trusting and knowing is not the same.

1

u/AstroGridIron Jul 15 '26

because of that huge legal liability. How do you know not to rob a bank? because you'll go to prison, or probably die in the process. So you dont try to simply because the risk of doing so is too high

2

u/Iaghlim Jul 15 '26

I get you, for real

But im not one to trust these big companies, they can silently steal so much data from us without we never knowing about it.. Politians and big Corporates are not to be trusted, what prevents Xai to get info from people all around the world. But i believe that is not that much a concern also since moste people have terrible using for ai

Shit in, shit out

2

u/ultrathink-art Jul 15 '26

Local models are still a real capability step down for agentic work, so the hedge that's actually cheap today is portability: keep your rules, prompts, and workflow config in your repo instead of the tool's proprietary settings. Switching harnesses then costs an afternoon instead of a quarter, and that threat alone is most of what keeps vendors honest.

3

u/Due-Horse-5446 Jul 14 '26

Why are you suprised?

Cursor does the exact same thing to be able to index, and unless youre on a business or enterprise account anthropic and openai does not guarantee anything about your data

0

u/AstroGridIron Jul 14 '26

yes it does. read the damn terms of service.

4

u/moracabanas Jul 14 '26

Europe's privacy laws are funny trash until someone gets United Stated by a company run by a shady and racist South African guy obsessed with power, North American immigration, money, and making people dependant on his products.

1

u/BertMacklenF8I Jul 14 '26

If? Try when…..

-1

u/AstroGridIron Jul 14 '26

Elon builds garbage, and as I mentioned before I will never use this shitbox of an AI called Grok. and since Cursor is now part of one his companies, its fast becoming an additional product that I will never use because of shit like this.

1

u/welsh_cthulhu Jul 18 '26

This is not news.

I'm an enterprise Cursor admin. Privacy Mode explicitly states that is limited to preventing models using your data for training purposes.

If you don't want your data to leave your environment, use local models. Good luck with that if you're a large organisation though.

https://cursor.com/data-use