josteink / web-privacy-reddit

Cleanse your comment-history automatically and regularly.

web-privacy-reddit

Protect your privacy by regularly cleaning your deep comment-history on sites like reddit.

Most comments only have temporal value for a discussion going on now, in a thread which will be forgotten and abandoned by next week.

It's extremely easy to slip out just a single link or piece of information which can be used to identify you, or your employer, without even noticing.

If you maintain your deep comment history, you are almost guaranteed to be identifiable in some way to someone determined enough to dig.

This tool aims to limit that ability by cleaning older posts from an account's history which probably no longer holds any value.

This is a simple module/experiment written in NodeJS to see how that works out. Depending on how it turns out it may become a part of a bigger suite of web-privacy related tools (Facebook, Disqus, etc)

Features

• Automatically delete old-posts

Dependencies

This project depends on

• NodeJS
• npm
• snoocore npm-package

It's currently in development, and covers just the most basic functionality. It's being developed and tested on Ubuntu and Fedora, but should work anywhere Node does, including Windows.

Install them using your favourite package-manager:

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

Using

Current status is that you need to download it, configure it and run it yourself.

To prepare it, do the following:

• Register a reddit API client and take note of app-id and app-secret. Set application callback url to http://localhost:8000/auth
• Execute the following bash-snippets

# clone repo
git clone https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-reddit
cd web-privacy-reddit

# restore package-dependencies
npm install

# insert your app-id and app-secret here
nano config.json

# run application
node index.js

After that, the application should be running in an unconfigured state. To complete the configuration-process, the application will tell you to visit a web-page: http://localhost:8000/.

Go there with a browser and follow the instructions.

Once configured, the application will start. Next time you start it, the authentication-data will be restored from disk and the configuration interface will not be started nor needed.

Note: Port can be changed in config.json, if already occupied by other software. Make sure to update your application-registration accordingly.