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).

Then run:

cmake .
make

How to run

sudo tcpdump -n -l dst net 192.0.2.1/32 $(for a in $(cat goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done)  |  ./teller 

And then cry.

Problems

If tcpdump complains about Warning: Kernel filter failed: Cannot allocate memory, try this first:

sudo sysctl net.core.optmem_max=204800

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.