What every Browser knows about you or Webkay is a free tool that displays information that your browser shares about you with websites. It displays the information in different categories like Location, OS, Social Media, Network Connection, etc. For each of these privacy-related categories, it will display the information and some methods to prevent it. The basic concept of this tool is to make you aware of different privacy-related threats like Clickjacking and websites stealing your personal info. It encourages the use of web proxies and secure browsers like Tor.
Whenever you open a website, it can access tremendous information about you, which the browser shares with the website. Things like your location, your OS, browser that you are using, screen resolution, internet provider, and a lot more things are easily available. If you want to know exactly what information about you can the browser share with websites, this is the tool for you.
What every browser knows about you?
As you might be aware that web browsers knows a lot of user’s information and websites use your web browsers as a gateway to gather personal information from browsing history, cookies, etc. What scares me the most is the fact that these websites can access this important information without your prior consent. There are a number of different solutions that you can use to browse the internet securely and anonymously. I will recommend you to use secure browsers that delete browsing data like cookies, cached data, download history, etc automatically after a browsing session is ended. If you don’t want to switch to these browsers that I mentioned then you can use these VPN extensions to hide your identity (not completely) or install some script blocking extensions to block javascript running on your browser (you can turn it off from the browser also). Most of the websites nowadays use modern fingerprinting technologies to identify browser/device type and user information. If you are a Chrome user then you can check out this Chrome extension to block fingerprinting techniques straight away.
Webkay is a tool that provides you the complete information that can be accessed by websites without requiring your permission. It demonstrates the fact by displaying the information stored in your browser on its interface. It shows information about how different websites access your location without GPS permissions, scan your network for discovering devices, underlying hardware information about processor, GPU, battery, etc. What scared me the most is that websites can also find out which social network you are currently logged in. You can view more information by visiting this tool from the link provided at the end of this article.
After you visit this website, it will show the location of your PC by using Geolocation API of Google for demonstrating the precision up to which a website can detect your location without requiring GPS permissions granted by you. In my case, it was able to correctly show the city I am located it.
Webkay also shows that a malicious site can easily scan your network through your browser and discover a list of devices connected to it, as shown in the screenshot below.
It also displays information stored by your browser about hardware like CPU and GPU, device orientation info, logged in social media platforms, connection info like the service provider, and many others.
A complete list of information displayed by Webkay that is provided by browsers:
- Location
- Software
- OS
- Browser
- Browser plugins (not extensions or add-ons).
- Hardware
- CPU
- GPU
- Battery
- Connection
- Previous Page
- Service Provider
- Download Speed
- Local IP
- Public IP
- Social Media: Shows social media platforms on which you are currently signed in on your browser.
- Information about Clickjacking.
- Gyroscope: Displays device orientation info.
Verdict:
Webkay is a free tool to display a set of information that could be captured by websites to track you down. In this article, I talked about the information displayed by this tool and suggested you some tips from my side that will surely help you in browsing the internet securely and anonymously. You can protect yourself from malicious sites from extracting any information from your browser by using web proxies or the browsers that I mentioned in the article; don’t forget to check them out.
