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Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

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Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#2

Post by jawns »

$20 for a browser extension that blurs text on a page! Yikes!

This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me.

I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#3

Post by ly »

When the text is blurred you can sometimes still find out what letters were blurred. I think it would be smart to replace any any blurred text with random characters with the same length. Only then can you be sure the sensitive information is actually hidden.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#4

Post by grenoire »

jawns wrote: post #2

$20 for a browser extension that blurs text on a page! Yikes! This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me. I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

$15 if you read the copy atop, I don't think that's so steep.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#5

Post by mpeg »

I don't mean to be overly critical of your product, as I hate when people do that on HN

However, you should know blurring is not a secure way of censoring information, as each character is still sort of recognisable, and programmatically reversing the blurring of known alphabets and typefaces is not that difficult (for numbers, you could blur each number from 0-9 and look at the resulting images)

This is even more obvious in the text that includes caps and descender characters (q/g)

Maybe you should consider a black rectangle instead?

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#7

Post by peterangular »

grenoire wrote: post #4
jawns wrote: post #2

$20 for a browser extension that blurs text on a page! Yikes! This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me. I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

$15 if you read the copy atop, I don't think that's so steep.

Most extension devs can knock something like this out in a weekend. It's steep.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#8

Post by peterangular »

You're not handling input elements correctly. Using CSS to hide things like CC number fields etc via blurring is a fool's errand. You're going to have split-second rendering issues that still display info in cleartext on the screen (I get this is for an "already loaded page" but still - I would hope blurring persists from page to page). Sometimes Chromium gets buggy and can display stuff for seconds at a time before a CSS3 blur is drawn (trust me - I've tested this at scale).

As someone who's had to do this for automation purposes (can't get a CC/SSN in a screenshot due to compliance) you first set sensitive fields to "password" on the input element, query the DOM to ensure a "safe state", and THEN you fill then input.

Also - other comments on blurring being reversible are correct as well.

TLDR: Replace attributes/characters to do properly censor text on a webpage. Source - 10+ years of automation (same logic still applies to vanilla front-end dev). Not a very useful tool.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#9

Post by onion2k »

jawns wrote: post #2

$20 for a browser extension that blurs text on a page! Yikes! This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me. I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

Pricing is incredibly hard to get right. It's very, very likely that the market for a tool like this is small, so charging $2 would actually net the author far less than charging fewer people $20. In that regard it's correctly priced at $20.

The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value that the customer gets from it and not the amount work that you've put in to it. If you decide a price based on the level of effort it takes you then you are almost certainly not charging enough.

I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

The danger that someone could release a free version of your app exists regardless of what you've made. That's not a very good reason not to make an app and try to sell it.

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