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Apparently CodePen 2.0 sends data to their servers as you type

84 pointsby maxim-fintoday at 11:22 AM39 commentsview on HN

They send all typed into editor input to codepen.dev almost immediately (you would see in 1-2 sec after you typed your secret that it appears in respective Network/Response tab) even before one saved it. I tested this with a unique marker: after typing it into index.html, CodePen ran a build with "save:false", and the marker then appeared verbatim in the HTML served from the generated "*.codepen.dev preview". Thus, if you ever entered some secrets in there by mistake consider them compromized even if you did not publish/save the pen


Comments

giancarlostorotoday at 2:17 PM

Pretty sure it always autosaved so this makes sense to me? I always assume it would send my data over to their backend, its code that ends up there regardless?

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tvinktoday at 11:56 AM

You're gonna be shocked how many input fields do this for various UX features :)

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maxim-fintoday at 1:58 PM

CodePen does not disclose this in neither ToS nor in Privacy Policy, only in Builds documentation they say: “As you work on CodePen, your Pens are constantly running through the CodePen Compiler”

nseskintoday at 12:06 PM

There’s a detailed discussion of the same issue here https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1rj1oac/i_planted_f...

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midnitewarriortoday at 1:19 PM

Look into https://www.fullstory.com/ , many major websites use this, it's basically a real-time video view of the user's browser screen. You can see where they move their mouse, how quickly they are typing, each character one at a time.

I worked for a company that would have phone support for users, and we'd be watching their screens giving gentle suggestions to them as they were using our app for how to do what they needed to do. We never offered up what we were doing, but given users' poor descriptions of what they were doing, FullStory was an amazing customer service tool.

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cph123today at 12:05 PM

For basic previewing I like to use https://htmledit.squarefree.com which has been online for years and does it all client side.

pdyctoday at 11:57 AM

i made my own html playground that is browser only and shares preview via url hash because of these useless shenanigans of codepen, its not as featureful but i mostly use it for sharing single page html files

https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground/

bashytoday at 11:51 AM

Sent to them to render the preview pane. Same as pasting secrets anywhere on a browser.

Wait until you find out copying content on a computer might sent it over Wi-Fi/Bluetooth for sharing on other devices.

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kyprotoday at 2:04 PM

This is so it can restore any unsaved changes.

I take no opinion on whether this is good or bad, but I can see how from a UX perspective it's nice not to lose 10 minutes of work because your browser crashes or something.

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keepo404today at 11:47 AM

because this is how autocomplete logic works i guess? Frontend cannot guess language and completions for you

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qsbuildertoday at 3:30 PM

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tmpsvc2695f5today at 12:54 PM

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alfredo359today at 2:54 PM

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cetinserttoday at 12:14 PM

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