Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud

The investigation began with a routine check of disk space usage, revealing that the ~/.zcode directory was occupying over 700MB. Further investigation confirmed that the ZCode app, Zhipu's official AI coding desktop application, silently uploaded the entire workspace, including the complete Git history, LFS asset cache, reflogs, and global app configurations, to Aliyun OSS.

The RSA public key used for encryption was transmitted by the server, while the private key resided exclusively in the cloud. This means that the multi-hundred-megabyte ciphertext on the user's disk cannot be decrypted by either the user or the client, and only Zhipu's backend holds the key to unlock it. The investigation found that ~/.zcode is the data root of ZCode, and the size breakdown revealed that the 313MB ciphertext file contained the full Git history, accounting for 86.6% of the payload.

The capture/upload sidecar was instantiated unconditionally at startup, and there were no gating checks on user preferences. The privacy policy states that it collects "text, files, and code submitted during conversations," but it does not mention silently packaging and uploading entire workspaces and full Git histories. The automatic re-packaging of the deleted files indicates that this is a continuous process, not something that can be easily disabled.