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 Chrome/Brave extension (Firefox coming soon): 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!
While this is a charming proof of concept, encrypting every message with a single key available to literally anybody will only get you so far. Especially when you want to release a second edition of this and it will have to be compatible with the first edition… Etc.
You are absolutely right! Using a single public encryption key can not be considered as secured. But it is still more than having your content in clear.
I intend to add more encryption options (sharable custom key, PGP), that way users can choose the level of encryption they want for their public content. Of course, the next versions will still be able to decrypt legacy encrypted content.
In a way, it makes online Privacy less binary:
Instead of having an Internet where we choose to have our content either “public” (in clear) or “private” (E2E encrypted), we have an Internet full of content encrypted with heterogeneous methods of encryption (single key, custom key, key pairs). It would be impossible to scale data collection at this rate!
One other thing you might want to consider: security implications. For example, you could use this to inject an image into something that would usually be sanitized, plain text.
You have a point. Or even malicious links!
We have to be careful with the decrypted output. Redakt is an open source and collaborative project, just saying… 😜
Malicious links, yes, but if you can inject a surprise tracking pixel into stuff, that could be a problem. I’m not smart enough to inject other stuff, and I’m currently only affecting myself anyway
Image injection is something I will need to stress out.