What's this about?
OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop app can now remember your activity across the applications and websites on your computer — a feature called Computer History. The stated benefit is that future conversations feel more personalized and need less explanation, because ChatGPT already knows what you've been working on. It shipped the same day Codex became available in the ChatGPT Linux desktop app.
What exactly is the privacy question here?
An ordinary application only sees what happens inside its own window. A feature like this needs a much broader permission: to observe what other programs are doing on your machine — which sites you visited, which documents you opened. That's the same access level a keylogger or monitoring tool requires; what differs is intent, disclosure, and where the data goes. The important question for any such feature isn't whether the company is trustworthy but where the observation is processed: locally on your device, or uploaded to a server.
What's the community saying?
- "Treat these as trojans." The single most-repeated advice in the desktop-app thread: run them isolated, give them a full desktop inside a VM if you want, but never direct access to your real system.
- The frictionless installer is itself the risk. A well-received argument: a smooth install makes it easy to trap people into running an agent unsandboxed in their primary user account, or even with admin privileges by default — and recent security incidents suggest skipping isolation is already common practice.
- Blunt rejection from a vocal minority. "Do people really use that? It seems horrible to turn your computer into a spy device" captured a sentiment that ran through both threads.
- The Electron question. Several asked what a desktop app actually adds over the browser, or over the command-line Codex with MCP servers and per-folder context files — genuine puzzlement about what justifies the extra system access.