googerteller

Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google.

By bert@hubertnet.nl / https://berthub.eu/

Makes a little bit of noise any time your computer sends a packet to a Google service, which excludes Google Cloud users.

Demo video in this tweet

How to compile

You need a C++ compiler like gcc-c++ and CMake for compiling the binary.

You also need to install libpcaudio (libpcaudio-dev on Debian/Ubuntu, pcaudiolib-devel on Fedora/Red Hat, pcaudiolib on Arch/Manjaro).

Then run:

cmake .
make

How to run

Google is so large its IPv4 and IPv6 footprint can't be handled by tcpdump, or at least not efficiently. Therefore we need to define an ip(6)tables ipset. This will first exclude Google Cloud, and then include all the other Google IP addresses.

Install iptables 'ipset', and run (as root) the ipset-setup.sh script, or execute:

ipset create google-services hash:net
for a in $(cat goog-cloud-prefixes.txt)
do 
echo $a
	ipset add google-services $a nomatch
done 
for a in $(cat goog-prefixes.txt)
do 
	ipset add google-services $a
done

ipset create google-services6 hash:net family inet6
for a in $(cat goog-cloud-prefixes6.txt)
do 
	ipset add google-services6 $a nomatch
done 

for a in $(cat goog-prefixes6.txt)
do 
	ipset add google-services6 $a
done
iptables -I OUTPUT -m set --match-set google-services dst -j NFLOG --nflog-group 20 --nflog-threshold 1
ip6tables -I OUTPUT -m set --match-set google-services6 dst -j NFLOG --nflog-group 20 --nflog-threshold 1

Then start as:

sudo tcpdump -i nflog:20 -ln | ./teller

Or, to track a single process, fe firefox, start it and run:

sudo bpftrace netsendmsg.bt |
    grep --line-buffered ^$(pgrep firefox) |
    stdbuf -oL cut -f2 | ./cidr.py | ./teller

And cry.

Data source

The list of Google services IP addresses can be found on this Google support page.

Note that this splits out Google services and Google cloud user IP addresses. However, it appears the Google services set includes the cloud IP addresses, so you must check both sets before determining something is in fact a Google service and not a Google customer.