Pages on watchkeeper.net

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

watchkeeper.net would like to hear from:

Anyone trying Watchkeeper out. What the panel showed you, what surprised you, and what was hard to follow.
Anyone who found a bug. A request you know a page made that the panel missed, a count that looks wrong, or a crash.
Site owners who want to know more about what their own pages send out.

Write to info@watchkeeper.net.

Bug reports are also welcome on GitHub. It helps to include your operating system, the Watchkeeper version from the download page you used, the address of the page and a saved report. A report holds site names and addresses without query strings, so look it over before you send it.

Download Watchkeeper

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Watchkeeper is one small installer for each system. The links always point to the latest release.

System	Download
Windows 10 and 11, x86-64	Watchkeeper-windows-x86_64.msi
macOS, Apple silicon	Watchkeeper-macos-arm64.dmg
macOS, Intel	Watchkeeper-macos-x86_64.dmg
Linux, Debian and Ubuntu	watchkeeper-linux-x86_64.deb
Linux, any distribution	Watchkeeper-linux-x86_64.AppImage

Checksums are in SHA256SUMS. Every release is listed on GitHub.

Install

The installers aren’t signed yet, so each system asks you to confirm the first time.

Windows. Run the .msi. If SmartScreen warns you, choose More info, then Run anyway. Watchkeeper uses the WebView2 engine that comes with Windows 10 and 11; on an older machine the installer fetches it.
macOS. Open the .dmg and drag Watchkeeper to Applications. The first time, right-click Watchkeeper and choose Open, then Open again.
Linux. Install the .deb with sudo apt install ./watchkeeper-linux-x86_64.deb, or make the AppImage executable with chmod +x Watchkeeper-linux-x86_64.AppImage and run it. Either way you need WebKitGTK 4.1, which current Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora releases have.

Each installer is built by the release workflow on GitHub, and each one runs the full self-test on its own system before the release is published.

Quick Start

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Watchkeeper takes a minute to set up. Download the installer for your system, install it, and open it.

Open a Site

Type an address in the bar at the top and press Enter. You can leave out the https://, so example.com works. The page loads on the left, and the panel on the right starts filling in straight away.

You can also start Watchkeeper with a site from the command line:

Reference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Everything Watchkeeper records, where it keeps it, and what it can’t see. The README on GitHub has the same facts in more detail.

What the Panel Counts

Line	What it counts
Other sites told about your visit	Registrable domains, other than the page’s own, that the page sent a request to: scripts, images, styles, frames, fetch, XMLHttpRequest, beacons, WebSockets and EventSource
Addresses requested	Distinct addresses, origin and path only, never the query string
Cookies for this site	Cookies in the engine’s store for the page’s site, including HttpOnly ones
Cookies for those other sites	Cookies for sites the engine itself saw the page contact
Storage writes	Keys written to localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB, and how many by frames from other sites
Fingerprinting reads	A drawn canvas read back, WebGL asked for the graphics hardware, an offline audio context made, each with the site whose script did it
Workers started	Workers and shared workers the page started

Names only, never values: Watchkeeper doesn’t keep cookie contents, storage contents or anything you type. The page’s full address appears in the address bar and nowhere else.