Recently, Trae IDE, an AI programming environment under ByteDance, has been caught in a data privacy controversy. A developer publicly disclosed on GitHub that Trae IDE continues to upload data to ByteDance's servers even after users manually disable the telemetry (Telemetry) feature, leading to strong criticism from the developer community.
The developer's test report showed that Trae IDE frequently transmits data in the background, making approximately 500 network requests within seven minutes and uploading a total of 26MB of data, targeting the domain name byteoversea[.]com, which is controlled by ByteDance. The report pointed out that the transmitted content may involve sensitive data such as user device hardware configurations, operating system information, usage habits, unique identifiers (such as machine ID, user ID), project paths, and even potential keyboard and mouse operations. In addition, the report claimed that Trae IDE has "backdoor capabilities," allowing it to remotely modify application behavior without the user's knowledge.
ByteDance responded to this, stating that the data collected by Trae IDE belongs to product statistics and performance monitoring, such as page clicks and frequency of function usage, and does not involve user personal identity or private information, and strictly complies with relevant data protection regulations. Regarding the question of "data being uploaded even after telemetry is turned off," the official explanation was that some features of Trae are based on the open-source VS Code framework. The VS Code Telemetry control only controls data collection for native VS Code modules, while Trae's own telemetry mechanism does not rely on this switch, which might have caused user confusion. ByteDance stated that they will optimize the product to avoid confusion and welcome user feedback.
Trae IDE is positioned as a free AI programming assistant aimed at improving efficiency. However, its high-frequency online behavior, resource consumption, and controversies around the telemetry mechanism have raised community concerns. Tests show that Trae's memory usage is more than five times that of VS Code, and the number of processes is also abnormal, raising doubts about its performance and resource management.
This incident once again highlights the importance users place on data privacy and software transparency.