Inspiration
We wanted to create a project oriented towards promoting privacy and security, and breaking down oppressive surveillance. One of the worst things about constantly being followed around the internet by internet trackers is not just the surveillance itself, but not knowing who is following you, and why. We to give people a way to see the companies and websites following them, and give them as much information about the organizations tracking them. In this way we turn surveillance on its head and re-empower people.
What it does
We did not finish the project.
However, if you download Firefox, and the extension LightBeam, you can then download a json file with hostnames of the webtrackers following you when you navigate Firefox.
We created a website which shows what the user interface might have looked like, with a button to allow a user to upload that json file to our website.
Our goal was to allow the user to then see a visualization of much more of the data on those webtrackers, such as location of the IP addresses, company name, and company location, but we did not get that far with the web development.
However, if you run the python code as instructed in the README from our github on your json file or our sample file, you can generate a csv with the IP addresses, city (if available), country and organization name of the webtracker's hostname.
How we built it
We wrote the python proof of concept first, with the intention to have it link into a website, however, we found that to be rather challenging, so we decided to write the process of getting the information from the json file and finding the ip addresses and other information in javascript so that we could build the entire thing in glitch instead of having to create our own web servers.
Challenges we ran into
One of our teammates did not really know any python at all, and had to learn as we went. None of us knew any javascript at all. And all of us had little to no experience in html and css.
Additionally, we ran into many roadblocks because we did not understand the fundamentals of what a website can do on the client side (we think that's why the file does not upload correctly).
We also spent a lot of time looking for free apis to convert the hostnames to ip addresses and to convert the ip addresses into additional information.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We love our website! It's the dark surveillance aesthetic we're aiming at. We're also very proud of the fact that we made a python program that lets you generate a csv file with all of that information about the organizations tracking you, because that's really the heart of the idea.
And we're really proud that we all kept working, didn't give up, and tried to make something to make the world a little bit better and give people back a little more power.
What we learned
SO MUCH. Python. Javascript. HTML. CSS. Git and Github. Web development. All about JSON files. All about ip addresses, hostnames, DNS lookups. And so much more about surveillance, web trackers, and who is following us!
What's next for TrackerTracker
We want to keep working on this project! We're all really passionate about this idea and we want it to work, and to make it as accessible as possible. We're going to keep in touch and collaborate over Github.
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