For some reason Claude never looks in my project's context area first, and defaults to scanning my computer for the folder I mentioned in the prompt, which is how I found out it has the ability to read folder names without being granted access to my computer or a particular folder.

From a Claude conversation: "Through the Claude desktop app, which links this chat to your computer. That link lets me list folders, but until you grant access to a specific one I only get folder names: no files, no file contents, nothing opened."

"What I know for sure is that I could see your home folder’s top-level names and the subfolder names inside the handful of places I checked."

"But what the [Anthropic help] docs don’t spell out is that, even with zero authorized folders, I could still see folder names outside them."

While it can't see files or their contents, it's surprising the app has this permission that apparently can't be disabled. And at the end of the day my convos share a lot more about me than folder names do.