Redact is a relatively popular tool for cleaning up people’s post or message history on platforms like Slack or Discord. Recently I found out about some questionable statements made by Dan Saltman, better known as Redact’s creator.
Most recent behavior
From two censored r/privacy posts, where we find the CEO pretending to know which tweets a customer deleted
The Redact dev recently recontextualized tweets of a streamer hasan. but then walked it back stating he wasnt a customer like the first tweet appeared. I didnt see that before, and the op really concerned me. I don’t know if I could trust them to reccomend, like have they been trustworthy in the past? And are there any alternatives that are just-work in the least?
3 months ago
I don’t trust that platform or the guy who runs it, Dan Saltman. He recently had multiple public meltdowns. At one point, he threatened to dox Twitch employees until he could get the CEO’s attention. Then he doxxed someone’s name and location on a public stream, and posted a picture of them as a minor.
4 months ago
From this r/privacy post
In what appears to be a now-deleted stream, Saltman threatens to dox people multiple times. He mentions Dan Clancy, the CEO of Twitch, and threatened to dox Clancy’s employees.
Did you know that they hide, by the way? Because I have a list of all the employees in Trust and Safety, and half of them hide. Sometimes… there are people… and you can’t get to them. no matter what level of insane targeting you do to them. Then you have to start going to the people that they care about, and then they start caring. but I’m guessing that Dan Clancy will care if his employees that are involved with trust and safety start getting named for being antisemitic people… they are responsible. I will set up a fucking website for every single one of these motherfuckers. And that’s how you make change… you make change by making the person feel the pressure of what they’ve done. Not the company, but the man. That’s how you make change. That’s how we will make change.
He also seems he threatened doxxing if they delete messages in a particular Slack channel (one he wasn’t a part of.)
This guy in red. I’m not going to identify him by name. and again, if anything happens to that Slack [chat], I will identify people.
This is especially notable because Slack is one of the services Saltman’s app supports.
Based on this behavior, I feel very uncomfortable using or recommending Redact.
Great post. Jesus, i almost used this service…
Hey, sorry to sound pushy but it’s against our instance rules to use twitter links. Can you change it to xcancel.com links? TIA!
No problem, I found and changed two Twitter links. It’s probably easier to save the videos of evidence that way, too
Whaaaaaaat the fuck. Thanks for the heads up.
They say “necessity is the mother of invention,” and damn, this guy needs a service that will delete his tweets.
Don’t know why people care about overwriting their comments. It’s not like Reddit and Discord lose your content anyway. Having my content sold by Reddit is just as bad as OpenAI or Discord, so I just don’t say private stuff on those platforms
It’s a way to explicitly revoke consent, make things more difficult to find for the general public, etc.
That makes it harder for people who might have benefitted from your solutions, but doesn’t do anything to prevent Reddit or OpenAI from accessing them. I don’t see a point
I mentioned revocation of consent explicitly in reference towards Reddit and OpenAI. But even if I hadn’t, a phrase like “that won’t even help” itself isn’t helpful unless you’ve scoped out full knowledge of the other person’s threat model. Case in point, you assumed anyone’s only possible threat would be Reddit, without considering it could be random jackasses.
Regarding potentially making information unavailable to the general public: touche. Sometimes, though, that can be an unintended side effect. Or an intended one. The Reddit blackout was one such case.
In your own comment you mentioned making it harder for the general public. If you think your comments might have had any value for anyone looking for answers, well now they can’t read any of your material, through no fault of their own. All the while Meta, OpenAI and Google strike back-handed deals with Reddit to steal your data.
In the end, you’re hurting the innocent internet user whilst not doing anything against the big giants. Do you truly not see the problem?
Case in point, you assumed anyone’s only possible threat would be Reddit, without considering it could be random jackasses.
I don’t understand. Unless someone posts private information on Reddit, how is Reddit part of their threat model? And posting such information on a capital-hungry platform means they have already given up their privacy to data brokers willingly. Sure maybe the script kiddie won’t be able to scrape your SSN from the internet but is that really the solace you’re looking for?
As to your final line: yes, a lack of content on Reddit will move people to alternate platforms. But there’s still A LOT OF CONTENT that is not present on Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon etc and if everybody starts acting like you then all of that knowledge will be lost. At this point, if your comments held any value for the general public, all you’ve done is deprive the average lurker. Is that what you want?
