Which is great! It's good for the community when people bring first-hand updates here, and to make sure that it continues, it's important that we respond respectfully. (I don't think your post was disrespectful, but commenters have crossed that line in other situations in the past.)
If you take into account that most people underestimate their own provocations by (say) 10x and overestimate those of others by (say) another 10x, that compounds to quite a skew. This can, and often does, plunge discussion into internet failure modes like rage fests and outright mob dynamics.
It's therefore best to temper one's indignation with some kind of alloy (as you did in your comment here) and not go full uninhibited. I know that's countercultural, counterintuitive, and unsatisfying, but it's the right tradeoff for this site, given what we're trying to optimize for.
When I'm talking to customer service people after a particularly egregious ordeal, I tend to edit myself and replace "you" (plus "you bastards", "you idiots", etc. ;) ) with <Company Name> for this same reason.
[1] and yes it seems very realistic that Claude himself may be the jackass responsible.
If you’re in the EU, send a complaint to your data protection authority.
I imagine quite a few would be very interested in following up and investigating here, and getting Anthropic to drop the email from the system prompt.
Nice that this time we get the company to admit it in public, and that they've been aware of that earlier but only acted now.
I suspect the privacy plugin method is a more sane fix -- ideally, plain old code should be inspecting any web request my agent makes and let me decide if that outbound request should contain certain sensitive strings. I'd also want to put a few bytes of my SSH private key and of any other sensitive keys in the 'do not leak' watchlist as well.
Not everyone uses the same company email with Claude and on github, not everyone commits to public repos, not everyone uses the same email on LinkedIn.
This is an example of a really weird gymnastics.
Me, for example, I'm using my private email with Claude, different email on LinkedIn, different email and unconnected username on a new github account I created for this job, and I don't even use it for public repos.
How come you get to decide that the fact someone puts their real email in commits and knowingly shares it with everyone is the same as Anthropic pulling a private, personal email and real name they had no consent to share - and spray it all over the Net?
Do you want to try again?