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Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

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Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the pointer but I don't think this is what happened in my case. I never opened the marketing assets in VSCode. They reside in completely separate folders.

Are you using Windows? IIRC Microsoft collects a hefty amount of data from your filesystem.

Good point again, but no. MacOS.

Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#13
post #3

Have you tried using github search to see if it's popping up there?

Not until now, thanks! There are no matches. The claim contains my client's company name. And not even the company name yields any search results.

Copilot is quite good at substituting variables and names. The question is whether you can find the claim for another company.

Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using Windows? IIRC Microsoft collects a hefty amount of data from your filesystem.

Good point again, but no. MacOS.

If VSCode scanned your files to feed Copilot, it's not just Microsoft who can access that, but anyone using copilot. Every single file in every single machine that ever ran VSCode would potentially be at anyone's grasp.

Allowing this to happen would've been incredibly stupid. But it's worth investigating further.

Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#15
Well this could be a huge security issue. Can lead to potentially Copilot-surfing for company secrets in a new form, since Copilot is already leaking secret API keys and copyrighted code.

The dangers of just regurgitating what has been read are unreal, since with good enough targeting you can read the data someone else wrote and expected to be anonymized. It's like huge global RAM of code, you just need to figure out how to get it to point at the right addresses.

Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#16

I think it also reads your clipboard. Yesterday, I had copied something from stackoverflow, and was about to paste it, and it gave me a suggestion before I could even drop it in.

Did it suggest this: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/31/the-key-copy-paste/

Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#17
I'll second the plausible suggestion that perhaps the name/marketing copy combo isn't as unpredictable as you might think. Corporate speak and company names are pretty formulaic. Try running the name and through GPT-3 and see what happens (or GPT-2 here: https://bellard.org/textsynth/)

E.g., I just prompted GPT-2 with a made up company name that doesn't have any google search results and got a completion like this:

Fully featured webapp for social & mobile networks in the cloud

Re: Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files?

#18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the pointer but I don't think this is what happened in my case. I never opened the marketing assets in VSCode. They reside in completely separate folders.

Are you using Windows? IIRC Microsoft collects a hefty amount of data from your filesystem.

IIRC that collection is optional
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