Hey everyone, so for the past few month I have been working on this project and I’d love to have your feedback on it.
As we all know any time we publish something public online (on Reddit, Twitter or even this forum), our posts, comments or messages are scrapped and read by thousands of bots for various legitimate or illegitimate reasons.
With the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT we know that the “understanding” of textual content at scale is more efficient than ever.
So I created Redakt, an open source zero-click decryption tool to encrypt any text you publish online to make it only understandable to other users that have the browser extension installed.
Try it! Feel free to install the extension (Chrome/Brave/Firefox ): https://redakt.org/browser/
EDIT: For example, here’s a Medium article with encrypted content: https://redakt.org/demo/
Before you ask: What if the bots adapt and also use Redakt’s extension or encryption key?
Well first they don’t at the moment (they’re too busy gathering billions of data points “in clear”). If they do use the extension then any changes we’ll add to the extension (captcha, encryption method) will force them to readapt and prevent them to scale their data collection.
Let me know what you guys think!
I totally applaud your efforts to find a solution to this issue but I don’t think this is practicable, at least in it’s current form. I get the underlying idea that changes to the extension will have to be continually adapted to by the scrapers but that’ll slow them down for a negligible amount of time.
I don’t mean to sound negative and I really do thank you for your efforts but I can’t see how this could be effective.
Slow them down and prevent them to scale is actually not that bad. We are in the context of public content accessible to anyone, so by definition it can not be bulletproof.
Online Privacy becomes less binary (public vs private) when the internet contains content encrypted using various encryption methods, making it challenging to collect data efficiently and at scale.
Thank you so much for your comment though <3