Someone Built a Tool To Get Congress' Browser History (vice.com)

A software engineer in North Carolina has created a new plugin that lets website administrators monitor when someone accesses their site from an IP address associated with the federal government. It was created in part to protest a measure signed by President Trump in April that allows internet service providers to sell sensitive information about your online habits without needing your consent. Motherboard reports: A new tool created by Matt Feld, the founder of several nonprofits including Speak Together, could help the public get a sense of what elected officials are up to online. Feld, a software engineer working in North Carolina, created Speak Together to share "technical projects that could be used to reduce the opaqueness between government and people," he told Motherboard over the phone. "It was born out of just me trying to get involved and finding the process to be confusing." The tool lets website administrators track whether members of Congress, the Senate, White House staff, or Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staff are looking at their site. If you use Feld's plug-in, you'll be able to see whether someone inside government is reading your blog. You won't be able to tell if President Trump viewed a web page, but you will be able to see that it was someone using an IP address associated with the White House. The tool works similarly to existing projects like CongressEdits, an automated Twitter account that tweets whenever a Wikipedia page is edited from IP addresses associated with Congress.

Comments

Nice

[nospam007]

I just hope he will donate that tool free of charge to pornhub if they give him the data they collect.

Re:Hilarious

[Registered Coward v2]

Trump is a Republican.

Trump may be many things be he isn't a Republican. The Republican Party was a convenient tool for him to use for his own ends; but in the end he only cares about what is best for Trump, the Republican Party or anyone else be damned. If destroying the Republican Party enables him to get the adulation he so desperately craves he'll be the first to toss on gasoline and light a match.

Re:Hilarious

[kainosnous]

I can avoid using Facebook.

I cannot avoid using my ISP.

You can use a VPN to hide your traffic from your ISP. They would only know when and how much your location makes connections. VPN technology is pretty easy to setup and is generally good for security.

On the other hand, to block Facebook, you would have to null route their hostnames. That can become a chore. Even if you don't intend to visit Facebook, unless they are null routed somehow, simply surfing most popular sites will connect you to Facebook. And that's just one site. There's tons of other trackers on the web, and most people couldn't even name a few of them. Yes, there are tools to restrict these, but they aren't as effective as a simple VPN.