Bert Hubert —developer, creator of PowerDNS and online privacy activist— has presented an application with which he intends to show how much data our computer sends to Google throughout a browsing session. And, so that we keep it in mind at all times, and we can relate what kind of actions trigger said shipments, alerts us by beeping every time this happens.
And, we’re afraid, this app (named ‘Googerteller’) it’s enormously noisy. Because the truth is that Google and the services linked to the search engine (such as its Analytics platform or its AdSense advertising network) are an omnipresent reality, although often hidden, on the World Wide Web.
Hubert intended with this project understand how much and what kind of data users are inadvertently submitting to Google; and, of course, it was also intended to raise awareness, seeking to make the public aware of the omnipresence of Google.
For it, created a list of IP addresses associated with its servicesfreely provided by Google, although it left out those linked to Google Cloud (which, in principle, are dedicated solely to hosting websites).
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Armed with this list, Googerteller takes care of** detecting any connection between our browser** (or any other application capable of connecting to the Internet) and said IP addresses from Google servers; and when it does, it will beep.
I made a very very simple tool that makes some noise every time your computer sends data to Google. Here is a demo on the official Dutch government jobs site. The noise starts while typing the domain name already. Code, currently Linux only: https://t.co/ZjKeOSfYff pic.twitter.com/dEr8ktIGdo
— Bert Hubert 🇺🇦 (@bert_hu_bert) August 21, 2022
In the first demo video posted by Hubert, such beeps are detected…
- After every key press in Chrome’s address barcaused by successive browser queries to display autocomplete suggestions.
- Virtually every click you make while browsing—including opening and closing menus— by an official Dutch government website. This is probably because site administrators make use of Google Analytics to record user behavior.
Given the skepticism of some users, who They claimed that the beep fest shown in said video was caused by Hubert using Google Chrome. —that is, another product from the same company— our protagonist decided to publish a new video using, this time, Mozilla Firefox, showing very few changes in the behavior of the application.
I did a demo of the Google noisemaker that makes some noise every time your computer talks to Google. This demo was based on Google Chrome & made lots of noise. People told me to expect this, since it was Chrome. Here is a video showing the exact same thing on Firefox: pic.twitter.com/btFbIbEivg
— Bert Hubert 🇺🇦 (@bert_hu_bert) August 22, 2022
For now, Googerteller is only ready to work on GNU/Linux systems: only its code is available on GitHub, which anyone can download and compile on your Linux (or even on your Mac, if they make some adjustments).
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