I Trusted My AI Coding Assistant. It Turned My Computer Into a Surveillance Server.
You think your AI is just helping you write code. In reality, it's built a logging system on your machine that you never knew existed. Every conversation. Every code snippet. Every file path. Every time you asked "what was my password again?" — permanently archived, without your knowledge. How It Started: An Accidental Discovery I was about to sell my old laptop and decided to clean up my data first. I opened Claude Code's config directory — ~/.claude/ — intending to just remove my API key. Then I saw this: history.jsonl 243 KB / 695 lines sessions/ conversation metadata session-env/ environment variables shell-snapshots/ command execution snapshots telemetry/ 63 telemetry files projects/ 19 project directories ├─ interview-prep/ 31 sessions / 20 MB ├─ spring-ai/ 11 sessions / 13 MB └─ ... 17 more I thought I was just writing code. My computer thought it should record everything. What's Inside These Files history.jsonl — Everything You Ever Asked 695 entries. Every single thing I typed into Claude Code. Including: "I forgot my database password — can you check what passwords were configured in the project files?" "How do I view the database password?" Pasted code snippets Every /model , "who are you?", and project path You casually ask about a password once. It's permanently stored. projects/ — Full Conversation Transcripts (43 MB) If you think history.jsonl only storing user input isn't so bad — you haven't seen this yet. Inside ~/.claude/projects/ , every project directory contains .jsonl files. Opening one 2.3 MB session file: Content Count AI responses 590 AI internal thinking blocks 272 Tool calls 101 Tool call results (including file paths) 100 File history snapshots 208 Every conversation. Every AI response. Every internal reasoning step. Every file operation — what was read, what was modified, what was executed — all written to this file. shell-snapshots/ — Traces of Everything You Ran Your system PATH. Installed tools. Java version. All sitting in command s