[HN Gopher] Show HN: Redact - Automated deletion for your conten...
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Show HN: Redact - Automated deletion for your content on social
networks
Author : ds
Score : 98 points
Date : 2021-05-27 14:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (redact.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (redact.dev)
| aarchi wrote:
| Is Redact affiliated with the EFF? The prominent "Support the
| EFF" banner suggests so, but the FAQ makes no mention.
| ds wrote:
| No, we just believe in the mission of privacy and they seem
| like the biggest supporters in the business. They paved the
| road we now walk upon, so its due to give them something back.
|
| *edit- Seeing comments below, I can see the issues. We will
| remove the 'Support the EFF' banner for now until we can do it
| in a better manner.
| trutannus wrote:
| You may want to make that clear. I took that to mean this was
| EFF sanctioned, and that changed how I was going to vet this
| before I used it. That said, I love this project.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I support this suggestion very strongly. Currently, it
| really does seem like the service is affiliated with the
| EFF, which is misleading.
|
| Keeping the current design has at least two drawbacks.
|
| - First, it makes you seem shady. After realizing that you
| are probably not affiliated with the EFF, I became very
| suspicious of the service, especially since it is closed-
| source.
|
| - Second, there might be legal ramifications of
| "pretending" to be affiliated with the EFF.
|
| If the banner wasn't there, I would have most likely
| already downloaded and started using Redact for my personal
| research project. It looks like a great product!
| yosito wrote:
| Last time I ran a script on one of my social media profiles,
| Instagram locked my account, even though I ran the script in
| read-only mode. How does this prevent being locked out?
| jpdb wrote:
| I'm one of the people who helped build one tiny part of this, and
| I think the coolest part of Redact is the fact that it makes it
| possible to clean up your social media history without totally
| nuking it from orbit. Early on, we thought that most people would
| use the service once to delete everything, and never touch it
| again or only use it once every few months or even years. We
| quickly found that a lot of people want to continue to use social
| media services and like retaining the contents of their social
| media and history of their lives, but want to clean up some
| things that don't reflect their current views or could cause
| issues today.
| guavaNinja wrote:
| Beware, 3 years ago I lost my facebook account after I deleted
| all my posts using a python script that opened my facebook wall
| and iterated over the posts. Couple of days later, I was banned
| on facebook and whatsapp and never restored my old fb account,
| but somehow got back my whatsapp's. Probably they watch for
| possible bot interactions and flag them.
| tobr wrote:
| I would like to have this for Hacker News! Then again as far as I
| know there's no way to delete old posts other than to email a
| mod, so I suppose I could just schedule a regular automatic
| email.
| lucasnortj wrote:
| Delete all of your social media accounts full stop
| aboringusername wrote:
| If there are any Redact devs here:
|
| Please add a feature to 'edit' messages with random data rather
| than redact. This has the advantage of not only updating the
| 'live' database but also if it's backed up in the future they'll
| only have the garbage data and not what you actually said.
|
| Being able to overwrite history (where possible) is extremely
| valuable that reddit/discord let you do.
|
| Additionally, there should be a 'spoofer' mode, that randomly
| makes comments, uploads multi GB files full of random data and
| adds noise to further enhance privacy.
|
| I take great joy in "abusing" text areas and file upload boxes on
| the internet - it makes it significantly harder to track a
| subject in any way when you are making 1000 comments a day,
| uploading 10,000 photos you found randomly online and are joining
| 50 different channels ;)
|
| To be honest I should probably make a script to do that,
| especially on HN...
| city41 wrote:
| Just a heads up, Reddit now rate limits edits. Many redact
| tools out there have not adapted yet unfortunately.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/mg077m/not_even_...
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > To be honest I should probably make a script to do that,
| especially on HN...
|
| Please do not do this to HN. It'd make the service way less
| usable for everyone else.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| > Please add a feature to 'edit' messages with random data
| rather than redact. This has the advantage of not only updating
| the 'live' database but also if it's backed up in the future
| they'll only have the garbage data and not what you actually
| said.
|
| This is a good point. Reddit is frequently uploaded to BigQuery
| [0]
|
| 0. https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?project=fh-
| bigquer...
| slg wrote:
| Maybe I am alone on this, but it seems pretty unethical and
| selfish to "abuse" these systems and intentionally upload large
| amounts of garbage data in order to improve your own personal
| privacy. It is the equivalent of polluting. Feel free to
| overwrite and delete your comments to protect privacy, but
| users uploading "multi GB files full of random data" is putting
| a real burden on other people and is going to lead to a worse
| service for everyone.
| kodah wrote:
| Unethical, maybe. Though, how ethical should one be in war
| when the enemy is a tyrant?
|
| The signals to rebellion start slow: you pester and annoy the
| enemy to let them know they have tread on the wrong turf. You
| try to inform them, then you try to concede points for shared
| ground. Once the enemy has decided that your advancements and
| ground meeting are to their advantage, and continue to gain
| ground is what we identify as skirmishes and battle starts.
| You ambush, you destroy logistical routes, you make it
| difficult for the enemy perceive that this ground is
| worthwhile.
|
| At what point do you fire the cannons? At what point does the
| normally docile rest of society join you to arm your
| rebellious battlements?
|
| I think you are witnessing the populous arming their cannons.
| You can object, but you can't object that the enemy is closer
| than ever.
| slg wrote:
| This just seems hyperbolic. They aren't a tyrant because
| you can just leave their platform. You want to use their
| platform without any of the consequences that come with
| that usage.
|
| You are walking into someone else's house, making demands,
| and breaking stuff when you don't get your way.
| kodah wrote:
| Every rebellion looks hyperbolic from the outside, I
| would say.
|
| Reddit is indexed by an outside party, not Reddit itself.
| Twitter is the same way. The most infamous of Facebook's
| data exfiltration was Cambridge Analytica, which again is
| an outside indexer. The accurate comparison, imo, is "we
| all came to this land to communicate together, but you
| use the platforms features to stalk people."
|
| Advertising is more of a concession of privacy, which I
| can tolerate if it's iterated on.
|
| The option you lay in front of people is "leave". So,
| someone of my convictions must leave once a platform
| becomes so popular that it attracts professional
| stalkers? Why is that the only acceptable option to you?
| slg wrote:
| Honestly this explanation makes it sound worse to me.
| Your objection doesn't appear to be with these social
| media companies. It seems to be with the very nature of
| public communication. You want the benefit of publicly
| communication without facing any repercussions for what
| you said in public. And in order to help ensure you don't
| face repercussions, you are polluting the shared public
| spaces for everyone else and forcing these social media
| companies to clean up after you.
|
| Every public platform can be externally monitored and
| archived. If you don't accept that, don't participate in
| public platforms.
| kodah wrote:
| Not really. I've participated in public communication
| since I was a kid. IRC, public forums, etc...
|
| Advertisers and platform monetization are definitely part
| of the problem, don't get me wrong. I just signalled that
| I'm willing to iterate on that problem. When my mother
| gets a call on her cellphone by a recruiter _looking for
| me_ when we share zero relationships online it signals a
| pretty desperate issue in how data is being used,
| correlated, and exploited. The public side of these APIs
| is just an exacerbation of those issues, because they 're
| the same APIs an advertiser uses.
|
| You painting me as someone who is trying to avoid
| repercussions is interesting. Do you normally assume the
| worst about people when you debate them?
| slg wrote:
| >You painting me as someone who is trying to avoid
| repercussions is interesting. Do you normally assume the
| worst about people when you debate them?
|
| I think you are assuming a specific connotation on
| "repercussions". I'm not talking about "repercussions" in
| the coded "cancel culture" way. I am saying that you want
| the positives of speaking in public without the unwanted
| negatives. That is the literal definition of avoiding
| repercussions.
|
| If your public speaking establishes you as some type of
| expert, people are naturally going to start reaching out
| to talk to you. That is the nature of public discourse.
| What that recruiter did is wildly unethical, but it is a
| natural repercussion of publicly showing traits of the
| person the recruiter is looking to hire. There are
| downsides to being a public citizen. You don't get a free
| pass to act unethically in order to avoid those
| downsides.
| kodah wrote:
| > I think you are assuming a specific connotation on
| "repercussions"
|
| Use more careful wording then. In my eyes, you're here to
| deny that a problem exists (for average people, not
| experts) and you're advocating for me to not participate
| in communities which I was historically able to
| participate in without having my data exfiltrated or
| stored in perpetuity. I've argued in the past that limits
| to public data could perceivably exist, I think this is
| reasonable, but to a denialist nothing is reasonable.
|
| The framing you propose is quite rosey, but then you
| immediately walk it back with how bad it is, but that
| it's a "natural" repercussion. So, while I want to do
| something about it before it becomes a bigger problem
| that can't be contained you're happy to sit back and say
| there's nothing to see here.
|
| But hey, feel free to keep commenting on my ethics
| without questioning your own.
| slg wrote:
| I don't know what to tell you. I feel pretty comfortable
| with my ethical stance here of "Don't abuse a public
| resource or intentionally create more work for other
| people purely for your own personal convenience."
| kodah wrote:
| I think I've made it pretty clear "personal convenience"
| is not the issue at stake here. I guess you're just
| arguing in bad faith at this point.
| slg wrote:
| As you said previously...
|
| >Do you normally assume the worst about people when you
| debate them?
|
| I don't know what I said here that seemed to offended
| you. If you point out something that truly crossed a
| line, I can apologize. You weren't the one who my
| original comment was directed towards and in your very
| first comment you admitted yourself that this type of
| behavior was potentially unethical. I don't think I have
| said anything worse than that and I don't know what I did
| that you consider bad faith. The one example you gave of
| a negative result was a recruiter calling your mother.
| Stopping that falls under the category of "personal
| convenience". We all get unwanted calls from time to
| time. It is annoying, but it takes a couple minutes out
| of your day and you move on. No reason to take that as
| justification for flooding public sites with "multi GB
| files full of random data" which is where the
| conversation started.
| kodah wrote:
| Yeah, that's not "personal convenience". I would say this
| borders on safety. I don't think it's that difficult to
| imagine how this same dataset in the hands of a bad actor
| is to be abused.
|
| In your case, my assumptions of you are based on how you
| continually downplay concerns to "not happening" or
| "that's no big deal". You also readily accused me of
| avoiding repercussions, then walking back and walking
| forward those claims in some kafka-esque dance.
|
| "Arguing in bad faith" also doesn't mean you've offended
| me. It's just a realization that you have some other
| motivation at stake here. People don't just recategorize
| a safety and privacy issue as "personal convenience"
| while dancing around calling it a problem.
| throwkeep wrote:
| Are they actually overwriting history though? Or are they just
| adding another record, and hiding the previous version(s)?
| slow_donkey wrote:
| Hm any competent ops team would have backups if they really
| cared to find your original data
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| beware deleting your own messages on discord ("self botting") is
| against tos and people have been banned for it, myself included
| vallas wrote:
| Can we blame Discord for this? Edit: Does Discord deletes all
| user messages when it bans an account?
| Nadya wrote:
| I've been using a very messy compilation of too-frequently-
| abandoned tools from Github for things like this and slowly
| applying local patches to them if/when they break and if I can
| even determine what the problem is. Primarily to scrub my Reddit
| and Twitter histories every so often.
|
| So this is absolutely something I'll be using.
|
| One thing I noticed immediately is that "DeviantArt" is not
| listed as "Coming Soon" on the web page but is not currently
| available in the desktop Electron app.
|
| E:
|
| One feature I would like to see is a Whitelist for Subreddits. I
| currently remove all of my posts except posts in a subreddit
| where 99% of my posts are Help/Q&A posts that I want to be able
| to benefit future people. However I want to delete all my other
| posts, which means knowing which subreddits I've posted in which
| is not always easy since I sometimes land on things from /r/All.
| (eg: "Delete all posts except on /r/Granblue_En") For now I had
| to manually add a list of 56~ subreddits one by one that I got
| from my log.
|
| E2: One of the team members (Dan) responded to me over Discord.
| My requested feature was already on the ToDo list since they have
| a similar use case.
| thinkloop wrote:
| How come HN doesn't have to follow delete laws allowing users to
| delete their messages?
| nenaan wrote:
| GDPR doesnt apply in America.
| ds wrote:
| Hey HN- Im one of the team members at redact. Redact is a cross
| platform electron app which allows you to delete content
| programmatically from most of the big sites out there (we are
| adding more every day). Meaning, you could say something like
| "Delete all posts I made on instagram with less than 15 likes in
| 2019" or (very soon) "Delete all my tweets that are political" We
| have been working on this for a little over a year. As you can
| imagine, working with some of these legacy services is less than
| ideal. (looking at you skype)
|
| When we launched, we were aware of tons of other free services
| that let you delete content, but we found that most of them were
| either unmaintained and broken, not feature rich enough or
| complicated for grandmas to install. "Ok, so first- download Kali
| linux to a thumb drive. Then reboot into it and install python
| and clone this repo...."
|
| Our goal with redact is to make privacy as accessible to the
| general public as possible. There are tons of services that let
| you delete 'public' data about you (for instance, deleting your
| whitepages.com page) but we found very few which took care of
| content YOU created across more than 1 service.
| itake wrote:
| Any ideas why your app is so big?
|
| macOS Redact is 433MB. Firefox is 370MB. Is this an artifact of
| electron?
| [deleted]
| jarek-foksa wrote:
| This is the new normal for Electron-based apps on macOS. The
| Electron framework itself is ~350 MB when targeting both
| Intel- and M1-based Macs.
| ds wrote:
| Yeah, electron :)
| FractalHQ wrote:
| Check out Tauri it is much an smaller and faster than
| electron.
| beedrillzzzzz wrote:
| Do services like Facebook Messenger or Twitter allow you to
| totally delete/redact messages, or is it just hiding the data
| from the user's view on one side?
| slg wrote:
| >Meaning, you could say something like... "Delete all my tweets
| that are political"
|
| Are you open to sharing how this will be done? Are you doing
| analysis of the body of the posts, where they were posted, who
| or what they are replying to, etc? I imagine this is more
| difficult on some social media sites. Twitter for example is
| highly time sensitive. A tweet in reaction to some political
| news event might not have any political language in it and only
| reveals itself to be political when viewed in the proper
| context.
| 3ygun wrote:
| Dan congrats!
|
| Q: Was a reason you choose a User installed application
| (Electron or Mobile App) vs SaaS to avoid having to store
| username/password for sites and the ToS issues that result from
| that? Or am I off base with previous comments in another
| Discord?
|
| Meme Q: Were earlier versions of redact.dev so powerful they
| redacted the trip to Japan? :(
|
| Best wishes and #YeeAlwaysWins
| [deleted]
| norcon4 wrote:
| Found this interesting from the FAQ:
|
| > "Why don't you support anything made by Google or Apple?"
|
| > At this time, we are reliant on both Google and Apple to be
| listed in their respective app stores. As such, we have been
| advised that in order to remain in good standing we should not
| offer support for these services.
|
| What a disturbing reality these developers are up against. Even
| though this is a big limitation, the project is wonderful!
| fnord77 wrote:
| facebook / twitter will complain to apple and they'll get
| booted.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I expected this to be a project with a few developers on it. But
| it looks like a serious company.
|
| What I don't understand is why an electron app? Why not a SaaS
| app?
|
| I see the plan to make money via premium features on the phone
| apps but I am even more confused to why I would want to run this
| on my phone.
| amalantony06 wrote:
| Electron app obv implies more privacy in a sense (assuming that
| no data is sent to their server).
|
| You wouldn't but "average users" would prefer to run it on
| their phone. For example, this could turn into a social media
| management tool for "influencers" and celebrities - managing
| their social media profiles with advanced deletion conditions
| etc.
| david-cako wrote:
| This is an awesome tool that addresses a real need for many
| privacy conscious folks!
| uoflcards22 wrote:
| This is truly awesome. Been using hacky scripts for this purpose
| for a while - seeing a more formal solution is very exciting.
| Kudos. Also, would definitely pay for this, FWIW
| fotta wrote:
| How does this get around Twitter's limits on retrieving older
| tweets? Last time I built a script to bulk delete tweets I had to
| manually export my data to get all the tweet ids for older
| tweets.
| endiangroup wrote:
| AD: I can't see any source code? Did you redact it already?
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