Bert Hubert made tracker leaks audible and a million people watched the demo

Bert Hubert had known for years, from studying his own traffic logs, that a huge share of websites send every visit and click to Google. The knowledge changed nothing, because a log has to be captured and analyzed first, and even then the conclusion - 'well yeah that is a lot' - stays abstract and easy to shrug off.

His move was to stop counting and start beeping: a small tool that plays a sound every time the computer sends data to Google. In a screen-recording demo it shows the official Dutch government jobs site, which also advertises for the intelligence and security services, beeping on every page and click - including the buttons 'apply for this job' and 'call us for information' - none of it with the visitor's permission. He announced the tool in a tweet, and within a week the video had received a million views.

The result is not a technical trick but a communication one. Sound is the channel humans treat as an alarm: a beep arrives in real time, needs no expertise to interpret, and each ping is one discrete event, so the sheer volume of tracking is experienced rather than summarized. The choice of subject did the rest of the work - a state jobs site recruiting spies that quietly leaks every click to Google is an irony that makes the demo impossible to forget and easy to share.

Encouraged by the response, Hubert extended the tool to Facebook and dozens of other trackers and released it as rough open-source software (googerteller) for Linux, macOS and BSD users comfortable with a command line. He also sketched a public installation: a poster with a QR code that joins a phone to a demo WiFi network, with one speaker per tracker - a huge Google speaker, a Facebook one and dozens of smaller ones - so visitors can hear what their devices do all day.

Sound each tracker ping so the leak is felt, not logged

Sound needs no analysis: a beep is interpreted instantly, so the demo persuades people who would never read a packet log or a privacy report.

Each ping is a discrete event, so the accumulating beeps convey scale honestly - viewers count nothing and still feel how often their data is being sent.

The target was chosen for maximum irony: a Dutch government site that recruits spies quietly handing every click to Google made the missing consent concrete.

Real-time sound turns a background process into an experience, which is why the demonstration spread as a video instead of staying a blog post.

Open-sourcing the tool and planning a speaker-per-tracker installation let anyone reproduce the demo rather than just trust the author.

Make an invisible, continuous problem audible in real time and demonstrate it on the most credible, ironic target; each beep convinces where a log or statistic does not.

Within a week the demo video had drawn a million views, and Hubert expanded the beeper from Google to Facebook and dozens of other trackers before publishing the rough command-line tool on GitHub as googerteller. The roadmap - one-click macOS build, Windows support and a live QR-code WiFi installation with one speaker per tracker - stayed as invitations for help rather than finished products, with mobile versions dismissed as hard because 'phones prefer to snitch on you in full privacy'. The piece resurfaced on Hacker News on 6 November 2024 and drew 394 points and 76 comments.