Watchkeeper on watchkeeper.net

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.

Watchkeeper Is a Tiny Free Browser That Shows You Who Is Watching

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

Open a news article and you see a headline, some text and an ad or two. You don’t see the other companies the page told about your visit while it loaded. On many news sites that list runs to a dozen names or more, and nothing in a normal browser window mentions any of them.

Watchkeeper is a small browser built to show that list. You type an address and use the page as you would anywhere else. A panel on the right fills in as the page works: the other sites it contacts, the cookies it leaves, the keys it writes to your computer and the scripts that read your device’s fingerprint.

Why a Browser That Watches Trackers Is Called Watchkeeper

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

On a ship, someone is always on watch. While the rest of the crew sleeps, eats or works below, one officer stays on the bridge, keeps a lookout and notes what passes. That person is the watchkeeper, and watchkeeping is still the word sailors use for the job.

The day is cut into watches of about four hours, so nobody has to stay alert for too long. Whoever has the watch looks out for other ships, lights and changes in the weather, and writes what they see in the log. The captain doesn’t have to stand there all night. The log says what happened.