I audited the privacy of popular free dev tools, the results are terrifying

WaitWaitWha 52 points 24 comments March 03, 2026
www.toolbox-kit.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (10 comments)

iberator

That's why real programmers are those who can work offline without the Internet. (just the repositories) :) local first.

bmenrigh

Can we stop it with "and the results are terrifying", "and you won't believe what I found", "the <x> situation is insane", etc.? The over-hyping of low quality, low effort content is making it hard to find actually interesting or informative things.

gmuslera

Using canary URLs in these and other sites may be interesting too.

OsrsNeedsf2P

Decent article. Painful to read the LLM output.

speedyapoc

Comment is a bit of an aside, but it's a shame what happened to JSONFormatter.org. The UI was preferable to alternatives for me, it ranked highly in Google so I could just search "JSON formatter" and access it, etc. Now the site freezes 50% of the time when loading it on my Mac and when it doesn't freeze, there's a 5 second period of waiting before I can paste any input. Not to mention ads taking up 40% of the screen. The classic tech cycle of life.

beart

I love regex101.com, so really happy to see it breaks the mold here.

dbacar

Glad that I am using Firefox with: - uBlock Origin - cookieAutodelete - privacy badger Any additions to my arsenal welcome!

hohithere

> Free Dev Tools And test only online websites (」°ロ°)」

deafpolygon

what dev uses public websites to do any kind of work?

Hizonner

Why would you use a web site to format JSON, encode/decode base64, take a diff... These are all things your local computer can do just fine.

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