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)<p>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...."<p>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.
If there are any Redact devs here:<p>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.<p>Being able to overwrite history (where possible) is extremely valuable that reddit/discord let you do.<p>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.<p>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 ;)<p>To be honest I should probably make a script to do that, especially on HN...
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.<p>So this is absolutely something I'll be using.<p>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.<p>E:<p>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.<p>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.
Found this interesting from the FAQ:<p>> "Why don't you support anything made by Google or Apple?"<p>> 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.<p>What a disturbing reality these developers are up against. Even though this is a big limitation, the project is wonderful!
I expected this to be a project with a few developers on it. But it looks like a serious company.<p>What I don't understand is why an electron app? Why not a SaaS app?<p>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.
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?
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.
The T&C [1] state that “Prices for our products are subject to change without notice.”.<p>Is the current version of the product paid? How are you planning to monetize it in future?<p>[1]: <a href="https://redact.dev/terms" rel="nofollow">https://redact.dev/terms</a>
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.
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
I like this as an option. When i did engage initially with Twitter, I found tweetdelete useful in culling tweets that were over 14 days old and nukereddit was useful in cleaning up the same.<p>Having nuked/deleted/closed all my accounts has had the same outcome with less work.<p>I dont have controversial opinions or political posts. Still on both platforms would get people shitposting/linking to a 4 month old tweet/comment because it was a hot topic again for 48 hours.
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.
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.
i remember doing this right from 2010 right till 2015 if i remember correctly. I used to spend hours trying to remember my old legacy handles which i had accumulated since 2004 and nuked them one by one. I still am on hibp but now the footprint is much smaller and it isn't tied to my "AFK" profile , just random usernames which i do not repeat anywhere.
"lurk Moar" is a concept which has all but forgotten these days now. People need to learn to adopt this to keep themselves safe out there.
Since this is an Electron app, does that mean your API keys are distributed in the app.asar? Otherwise, I'm not sure how it's possible to make OAuth requests on the user's behalf