/privacy-guard

name: privacy-guard
description: Prevents private infrastructure details (node hostnames, internal project names, local usernames and personal emails, absolute home paths, private and VPN IP ranges) from leaking into public repositories through commits, PRs, docs or release artifacts. Use when working in a public or soon-to-be-public repo, before commits or releases, when writing deployment docs for an OSS project, or when the user asks to "set up the privacy guard", "install privacy-guard", "check for leaks", "protect this public repo". Bootstraps a pre-commit hook backed by a gitignored local denylist plus gitleaks.
argument-hint: "[setup <repo-path> | check | update-denylist]"

privacy-guard

Guard against accidentally publishing details of your private infrastructure in public repositories (or in repositories that may become public later). Two legs: behavioral rules for the Claude session, always on, and a per-repo technical gate: a pre-commit hook backed by a gitignored local denylist, plus gitleaks.

Threat model

The public repository is the boundary. Anything that describes your private infrastructure must not cross it, in any form: committed files, commit messages, branch names, PR and issue bodies, release notes, published artifacts, screenshots.

**Sensitive, never in a public repo:**

• node hostnames and internal aliases (workstations, VPS, client machines)
• names of internal projects and service instances that were never published
• local usernames, personal and work email addresses
• personal domains and URLs of internal services
• absolute paths of home directories and internal mounts
• private-network IP ranges and VPN address space (for example the Tailscale CGNAT range

`100.64.0.0/10`)

• cookie files, tokens, credentials (also covered by gitleaks)

**Not sensitive, fine in public docs:**

• public products and technologies named generically (Tailscale, Docker, n8n)
• the maintainer's public GitHub username
• deployment patterns described in generic form ("a Docker host reachable over your private

network / behind a VPN")

The concrete list of sensitive tokens is yours and stays private. This skill ships `references/denylist-template.txt`, a placeholder-only starting point: fill it in a private location (a private dotfiles repo, a private notes repo) and treat that filled copy as the seed you propagate from. Never commit the filled version to a public repo.

Behavioral rules (Claude session in a public repo)

1. Never write internal tokens into committed files. Private deployment details are documented in a private repo or in a gitignored `.local/` directory, never in the public repo's docs. 2. The user mentioning internal names in conversation does NOT authorize writing them into the repo: the conversation is private, the repo is not. 3. Before every commit: re-read the diff looking for denylist tokens. The hook is the safety net, not the first check. 4. This applies outside files too: commit messages, branch names, PR and issue titles and bodies, CHANGELOG entries, published artifacts. 5. If a sensitive token has already reached published git history: tell the user immediately (rotation, history rewrite with BFG or filter-repo are their calls), do not just remove it from the tip.

Per-repo setup (`setup <repo-path>`)

From the root of the target repo:

1. Copy `references/check_privacy.sh` to `scripts/check_privacy.sh` and make it executable. It stays a **copy**: fix it here and recopy, never edit it there. See *Keeping copies current* below for why that rule needs a check behind it. 2. Create `.local/privacy-denylist.txt` from your private seed (or from `references/denylist-template.txt` on a first run), adapting the patterns to this repo's context. 3. Make sure `.gitignore` contains `.local/`. 4. Add the blocks from `references/pre-commit-snippet.yaml` to `.pre-commit-config.yaml` (gitleaks + privacy-denylist). 5. Run `pre-commit install`, adding `--hook-type pre-push` if the repo uses push hooks. 6. Verify: create a temporary file containing one token from the denylist, **stage it**, and check that `scripts/check_privacy.sh <file>` exits with code 1. An unfilled denylist (only comments) makes the hook a silent no-op, so this step is what tells you the guard is actually armed. Check the other direction too — a file with no token must exit 0 — or you have only shown that the script can fail, not that it discriminates.

> **Put a token in that file, not a pattern.** The denylist holds extended regexes, and > most of them are anchored (`\bexample\b`). Writing that text verbatim does not match > itself: the file then contains literal backslashes, the pattern finds nothing, and the > script exits 0 — which reads as "the guard is not armed" when in fact the test was > wrong. Strip the anchors and use the bare string the pattern is meant to catch. Measured > on 2026-08-09 while arming three repos: 6 of 29 patterns happened to match their own > text, so picking the first line of the denylist gave a false "not armed" verdict. > > Staging matters for the same reason: `check_privacy.sh` reads `git diff --cached`, so an > unstaged file has no added lines and the script reports that nothing was checked.

Design property: the denylist is NOT committed, because publishing the list would reveal the very tokens it protects. As a consequence the hook is a no-op for external contributors and in CI. Generic secrets (keys, tokens) stay covered by gitleaks, which runs everywhere.

Variant: repos with versioned git hooks

If the target repo sets `core.hooksPath` (a shared `.githooks/` directory committed to the repo), `pre-commit install` refuses to run, by design: *"Cowardly refusing to install hooks with `core.hooksPath` set"*. Do not unset it to make room for the framework, that would disable the hooks the repo already relies on. Instead, replace steps 4 and 5 with a call to `check_p