Packet analysis
I downloaded Wireshark and captured traffic for 5 seconds with my computer as it is (running multiple Chrome browsers, iMessage, Spotify, terminal, and Wireshark of course). Packets were captured using the following protocols: UDP, TLSv1.2, TCP, DNS, and TLSv1.3.
I tried to find out where some packets were coming from by searching repeated IP addresses using ipinfo.io.
One source address that I think is responsible for the most packet data is 192.168.1.8. Wireshark shows port 443 as source which is https communication. Ipinfo shows this source is a bogon which is a bogus IP address that falls into a range of addresses that hasn’t been assigned to an entity by the IANA.
Amazon packet traffic. I guess that makes sense, Jeff Bezos is always watching…
This must be google chrome, right?
Now I’m going to repeat this process but close ALL MY RUNNING PROGRAMS😨(except Wireshark). The packet traffic was much slower this time around so I captured data for about a minute.
This time I saw additional protocols I didn’t see last time: ARP and TLSv1.2. It also seems like an apple device is communicating with the network… it’s 192.168.1.8! Not really sure what that means.
Again, I made note of some repeated IP addresses and they were both associated with Amazon as well.
Testing my browser
I used coveryourtracks.eff.org to see how trackers view my browser. This info can be gathered from web headers included in my device’s network requests or using JavaScript code. Here’s just some info my browser is giving away:
Time zone
Screen size and color depth
System fonts
Whether cookies are enabled
Language
What type of computer I’m using
The number of CPU cores of my machine
The amount of memory of my machine
At least my browsers fingerprint appears to be unique, whatever that means! It conveys 17.53 bits of identifying information, but I’m not sure how you can identify only a portion of a bit.
Testing my websites
Project Blacklight is a Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector. It can reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on a site (Blacklight). Let’s start by trying it out with the site I’ve been working on for this class: priyankais.online.
This is a relief, right? Because I’ve been developing this site from the ground up over the course of this class and we didn’t put any ad trackers in place!
Now let’s try this site, priyankamakin.com, which is hosted by Squarespace.
Hmm… not really sure why my site is sending data to Adobe. At first I remembered that I’ve probably linked to different Adobe products in my blog posts but I realized that is not the same as what Blacklight is looking for. I’m personally not using the Audience Manager or Advertising Cloud products above but maybe Squarespace is?
Let’s see if we can find something a little bit more interesting! I don’t really find myself browsing the internet for leisure anymore, I’m usually doing homework or streaming tv. I know my dad’s doom scrolling on npr a lot, so is a news source mining its anxious readers for their data? The answer is: hell yES.
Among the long list of companies Blacklight found npr.org interacted with, there are some I’ve never heard of and their names put a weird feeling in my stomach: comScore, IPONWEB, Lotame, or Neustar. Who are these companies and why do they care about me (or my dad)?
Resources
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/