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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

For developers who truly care about anonymity, is relying on the server to strip out personal information really a good idea?

If I were that paranoid, I feel like I'd greatly prefer a tool that strips everything out on the client, then establishes a connection to your site via a Tor hidden service which then publishes the PR.

Another concern; isn't this a potential avenue for spam? How long before someone submits a bunch of spam PRs through the service and gets your Gitmask user account banned on GitHub as a result?

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To be honest, I wrote GitMask for myself. Yep,if anonymity is really important to you, a VPN and/or TOR is required. GitMask just ensures that you don't unintentionally leak personal info. GitMask is open source, so if you don't trust me to run it, just run it yourself.

Spam is a potential issue. All PR's reference gitmask.com so maintainers have someone to message if they get flooded.

Are you worried about potential licensing issues? Some projects make contributors agree to certain license contribution guidelines before they can accept pull requests.

If there is a question about non-OSS code coming in from Gitmask in a lawsuit, the affected project will most likely have to discard and rewrite all those contributions.

You may be interested in Gitnonymous which does not require a trusted 3rd party, and strips everything out on the client side.

https://github.com/chr15m/gitnonymous

To avoid accidents I suggest you actually create a separate user and develop from here.

For some, it's just a matter of social anxiety and basic privacy. If you don't want people to see youporn suggestion in you address bar, you don't have to bother with Tor – incognito window is good enough.

Unfortunately, people don't seem to understand what the Incognito window or FF privacy windows actually do. I've heard people tell me they use it at work so their boss can't see what they're doing face palm.

Amazing considering that both FF and Chrome point this out when opening a private window.

Firefox:

> Private Browsing doesn’t make you anonymous on the Internet. Your employer or Internet service provider can still know what page you visit.

Chrome:

> Your activity might still be visible to:

> * Websites you visit

> * Your employer or school

> * Your internet service provider

Though I'd argue that Chrome's message is less explicit because of the "might still be".

I also seem to remember that Chrome at one point used slightly more playful language explaining that incognito mode doesn't protect you from people looking over your shoulder either but that no longer seems to be the case.

Nope. Just use a VPN/Tor/whatever to create a GitHub account and push commits with nobody@example.com

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