Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google.

By bert@hubertnet.nl / https://berthub.eu/

Makes a little bit of noise any time your computer sends a packet to a tracker or a Google service, which excludes Google Cloud users.

Demo video in this tweet

Blog post with more videos

If need be, install Homebrew via https://brew.sh/ as this will allow you to compile new software. To do so, copy paste the instruction under 'Install Homebrew' into the terminal app (Apple help). This might take quite a while. It will also ask for your password.

Then run:

brew tap robertjakub/teller
brew install --HEAD googerteller

To then start the noise, enter:

sudo tcpdump -nql | teller

And it should work. For the last command, it may also again ask you to enter your password.

This will currently only work on Unix derived systems (like Linux, OSX and FreeBSD).

You need a C++ compiler like gcc-c++ and CMake for compiling the binary.

You also need to install libpcaudio (libpcaudio-dev on Debian/Ubuntu, pcaudiolib-devel on Fedora/Red Hat). For OSX this is a bit more work

Then do:

cmake .
make

Start as:

sudo tcpdump -nql | ./teller

And cry.

Tracker data is read from tracker.conf which you should only edit if you've learned about more IP addresses for relevant trackers.

In teller.conf you can edit for each tracker where the noise should end up (left or right channel), and what the frequency should be.

The list of Google services IP addresses can be found on this Google support page.

Note that this splits out Google services and Google cloud user IP addresses. However, it appears the Google services set includes the cloud IP addresses, so you must check both sets before determining something is in fact a Google service and not a Google customer.

Or, to track a single process, fe firefox, start it and run:

sudo bpftrace netsendmsg.bt |
    grep --line-buffered ^$(pgrep firefox) | ./teller

Or try:

sudo bpftrace netsendmsg.bt | grep --line-buffered -i chrome | ./teller

And cry.

This software gratefully builds on:

• doctest testing framework
• lpm Longest Prefix Match library
• Portable C Audio Library 1.2 - which you need to install yourself
• tcpdump of course