Over the years I've seen a lot of developers take none open-source code, or private JSON data strings and paste them into random sites they find searching "json format" on google.
Does that make anyone else cringe? Is there anything we can do about this? Or is this just not a big deal and I shouldn't worry.
I too wonder if I'm out of touch, if I'm tilting at windmills.
Or maybe I'm a crank and need to lighten up. That's why I'm asking.
Google runs this (or an internal version) of this service to make sure people serving third party ads aren't sending sensitive data. At one of my past companies our customers would send out email marketing campaigns that contained URLs with tracking parameters with PII. We wound up having to just strip off any query parameters we didn't explicitly need because Google kept flagging us for PII leaks caused by our customers.
So yeah, there's a lot of noise. But, people are listening out there!
> I don't trust new developers to make that determination.
Ignoring this issue is a sign of professional immaturity. Recommend you view it as an opportunity to educate the younger members of your team. Show them the power of a solid CLI toolbox that respects your privacy while delivering solid performance.
Still, you shouldn't be dogmatic about it. Webapp tools can be useful for understanding a new programming language or API. Just be judicious.
Security-related scanners are a tough one though. Free XSS scanners, free TLS cert checkers: The best intentions can result in unintended disclosure. Developers have it constantly beaten into their head "Security! Security! Security!" and are often given nothing more than an OWASP cheat-sheet, so I can totally understand and empathize with the thought process that leads someone to plug a company URL into a free web-hosted XSS scanner.
At least ngrok supports end-to-end TLS tunnels[0], where you use your own TLS key/certs and the ngrok server never sees plaintext (the ngrok client is also open source, so for the truly paranoid you can examine it to ensure it isn't doing anything nefarious).
But I agree... I've seen people at a company where I used to work pasting sensitive data into a public pastebin. It still hurts my brain to think about it.
Sure, don't put arbitrary shit on the internet and know where your data is going. But every example you gave is incredibly useful to many people on a daily basis.
copy(JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2))
That’s rather condescending, and probably not true. Surely you must be able to think of reasons why someone would use a website instead of writing a one-line program.
And the JS console was only an example. Other languages can also pretty print JSON trivially. E.g. python.
The biggest struggle for me is diffing random bits of text. Pulling two JSON docs from the DB and wanting to compare them. Recently found a VSCode plugin that makes it a bit better, but still a pain in the ass.
There are some things you just shouldn't paste into the internet.
Aside from that, this is one area where web-based applications excel: You can inspect and limit what data an application is sending away about you via your browsers built-in dev tools and extensions like uMatrix (or your own request-filtering extensions).
For example you can detect changes in window sizes or look for plugins that are in the global namespace (e.g. Redux Dev Tools). Better play it safe and don't copy and paste private data to random sites.
Another attack vector would be to avoid sending down any data unless it contains something that looks like a hash or a token, or has a keyword like "password."