How Watchkeeper Was Tested Against a Page Built to Fool It

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A tool that says “this page contacted five sites” is only worth something if the page really contacted five sites. Watchkeeper’s main promise is that nothing a page does gets missed, and that the page can’t hide from it or tamper with it. So the tests don’t ask Watchkeeper what it saw and trust the answer. They ask the servers.

The self-test runs the real app, on the system’s own web engine, against two small web servers started on the same machine. One plays the site at 127.0.0.1. The other plays a tracker at localhost, which counts as a different site. Both write down every request they receive, and those logs are the ground truth: whatever reached a server must be in Watchkeeper’s report.

Testing on watchkeeper.net

How Watchkeeper Was Tested Against a Page Built to Fool It