Is form data retained after submitting?

Question

I know practically nothing about Javascript, apologies!

But maybe you can help: I just stumbled upon this website, which "parses" code from Amazon purchases into a neat table that can then easily be copied for other purposes.

https://www.ardenstone.com/2015/01/11/exporting-kindle-books-from-amazon/

Before I go ahead and paste my whole amazon list though: Can it be ascertained somehow, whether this form is actually saved / sent / submitted somewhere? Or does it just deliver the results on this website for my eyes only? I'd appreciate if somebody could help out! Thank you!!!

It starts like this:

<form id="alp" name="alp" method="post" action="#" onsubmit="parseText(); return false;">
    <textarea cols="50" rows="10" id="alpIn"></textarea><br />
    <br />
    <input type="submit" id="alpSub" value="Parse" /><br />
    <br />
</form>

And parseText, after submitting, can be found here: https://www.ardenstone.com/projects/amazonkindle/amazonkindle.js

Answer 1

Unless the software is properly published, you can never be sure. The problem with a site like this is that he (the author) could make some unannounced change that turned it from something useful and benign into something potentially nasty.

When I say "he", that actually means anyone who could modify the site content, currently or at some time in the future. Yes, it is an https link, but who controls the webserver, the domain name, etcetera.

If you are seriously concerned about your privacy, then don't use this site. By all means:

• get hold of a copy of the code,
• analyze it,
• install it on your own (secure, private) platform for your own use.

But if you use the form on the public site where it is currently is, you are putting your own privacy at risk.

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(On the other hand, the kind of organizations that might be interested in your Amazon purchase history probably have better ways to find this out; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter )

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For what it is worth, I cannot see any obvious problems with the current ¹ version of the "amazonkindle.js" javascript. However, there could be subtle sneaky things going on. For example, it is conceivable that one of the other javascript blobs in the page alters the meaning of something, so that the innocent-looking code in "amazonkindle.js" does something unexpected.

^{1 - that is, current as of when I looked at it!}