Espionage purportedly facilitated by ByteDance AI coding tool

Unconscionable user data collection activities have been conducted by ByteDance's artificial intelligence-powered coding tool Trae IDE, a VSCode fork that is an alternative to Microsoft Copilot and Cursor, Cybernews reports.

Aside from executing over threefold more processes than VSCode, Trae IDE also spent 6.3 times and three times more memory than VSCode and Cursor, respectively, an analysis from developer segmentationf4u1t revealed. Despite the reduction of processes and memory usage in a subsequent iteration, Trae IDE was observed to have escalated data gathering following the deactivation of telemetry. Additional findings showed Trae IDE to yield a pair of telemetry payloads, with the first including various persistent user identifiers and hardware information, while the second displayed exact timings of user activity, complete file system paths, and other behavioral metrics. ByteDance was noted by segmentationf4u1t to have been receiving such information on its servers regardless of established user preferences.