About
watchkeeper.net is the home of Watchkeeper, a tiny browser that shows you who’s watching. You browse as usual. A panel beside the page lists the other sites the page tells about your visit, the cookies it leaves, what it writes to your computer and which scripts read the features used to fingerprint your device.
Why It Exists
Tracking is invisible. A news article can call a dozen other companies before you’ve read the first line, and nothing on the screen says so. The people who want to see it have browser extensions, developer tools or paid scanners, and all three assume you know what you’re looking at. Site owners are often in the dark too: plenty of them don’t know what their own pages send out, especially before anyone has answered the cookie banner.
Watchkeeper makes the watching the main feature. It’s a whole browser, small enough to download in a few seconds, and its panel uses plain words.
How It’s Built
- On the engine your system already has. WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS and WebKitGTK on Linux, through Tauri 2 and Rust. That keeps the installers at about 2 MB. The Linux AppImage carries its own libraries and is bigger.
- A private session every time. The page starts with no cookies, no saved logins and no history, and all of it is deleted when you close Watchkeeper.
- A detection script the page can’t switch off. It runs in every frame before the page’s own code, keeps its own copies of everything it relies on, and can only be read out with a secret the page never sees. How it was tested covers the tricks it was tried against.
- Honest about its gaps. The reference lists what Watchkeeper can’t see, and so does every report it saves.
License
All the code is open source under the Apache License 2.0, on GitHub. You can use it, change it and build on it.
Questions People Ask
Is it free?
Yes. Watchkeeper is free to use, and the code is free to take under the Apache License 2.0.
Does it block trackers?
No. It shows them. Watchkeeper lets every page load exactly as it would anywhere else, because the point is to see what the page really does. Each visit starts in an empty session, so nothing a tracker leaves behind survives once you close the app.
Does it name the companies behind each site?
Not yet. The panel shows the sites by their domain names, such as an ad network’s or an analytics service’s. Matching domains to company names needs a tracker list, and any list Watchkeeper uses has to have a license that fits Apache 2.0.
Can a site hide from it?
A site can try, and the test suite tries hard on its behalf. A page can add false entries about itself, and a flood of activity can push some addresses out of the count, which the panel then says. What a page can’t do is remove what Watchkeeper has already seen or stop it watching. The reference lists the gaps that remain.
Does Watchkeeper send anything anywhere?
No. It doesn’t phone home, and it has no account or analytics of its own. Apart from the web engine’s own housekeeping files, all it keeps on your disk is the short per-site record behind the Last visit section, which you can switch off, and the reports you choose to save.
Can I use it as my everyday browser?
It’s built for looking, not for living in. There are no tabs, bookmarks or saved passwords, and downloads are refused for now. Open it when you want to see what a site does.
Can I suggest something?
Please do. The contact page has the address.