Exploring Hidden Navigation for Domestic Violence Sites

Recently, I had the incredible honor to work with an individual who was a Survivor of Domestic Violence. This was all part of a business "hackathon."

Setting aside the ideas that came out and amazing projects that I got to see, there was one concept that had me intrigued.

The Project

• The Site: CONCEPT: Finally A Hero
• The Code: GitHub Repo

Hiding Navigation

Assuming that the people visiting the site are in some dangerous scenario, I wanted to know if the actual traffic can be hidden. Here, I was thinking of minimizing the cached files and browser history.

The first thing I looked into was disabling the cache.

Checking with a co-worker, I found that not caching files is easy, but we had to be careful of utilizing CDNs ... their content would be seen, regardless of how our server handled caching.

Next, I wanted to see if I could minimize the site's "footprint" ... which I am describing as seeing the pages viewed in the browser's history.

After a lot of research here ... I found almost no good results.

There is no easy way to clear browser history while leaving or after having left a site. I did come up with a somewhat reasonable solution. It's a bit of a hack and depends on the user to navigate within the site (not using the address bar, bookmarks, or back and forward options.

The Solution

What I came up with feels a bit hacky, but it does work.

navigate(event, location) {
  event.preventDefault();
  window.location.replace(location);
  return false;
}

What is happening here is that the

location

With a navigate like this, anchors can be adjusted, as follows.

<a href="#" onclick="anchor.navigate(event, 'index.html')">Home</a>
<a href="#" onclick="anchor.navigate(event, `http://www.google.com`)">Off-Site</a>

Basically, the code replaced the last cached link in the browser's history, ensuring that the site is only seen once.

Again, if the user navigates off the site using a link setup like the second one above, there is no reference to the site in the browser's history.

Conclusion

While this is not a wild amount of code for an open-source project, what it is doing is powerful and worthy of some exploration.

Here is the NPM project, the example site, and the GitHub Repo.

• Code: NPM Project - Tiny-Anchor
• Demo: Tiny-Anchor
• GitHub: Tiny-Anchor

My hope is that this code allows for additional safety and potentially inspires other code along the same lines.