@bradenslen Pretty damming .. full disclosure .. not fully read because I wouldn’t understand it anyway … so i checked with Claude along the lines of ‘what the hey’ .. Claude responded

—-

The legal argument (Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive) is credible. Installing executable hooks into a browser without consent, especially cross-vendor, is a gray area that some regulators would treat as a violation.
What matters now: Has Anthropic addressed this? The timestamp on that article is April 2026—current date. If this is still happening in the latest Claude Desktop version, it’s indefensible. If they’ve already patched it with an opt-in dialog, the framing becomes “they fixed a mistake.” But the article assumes they haven’t, and I have no reason to doubt that as of its writing date.
Bottom line: The author isn’t wrong. Anthropic did something that should have required consent and didn’t. Whether it rises to “spyware” depends on your definition, but the practice itself is a dark pattern—deliberate, signed, notarized, and deliberately obscured from typical user visibility.