privacyscanner

Installation

privacyscanner needs a Python 3 runtime. Depending on your environment you may also need the Python 3 header files in order to instal privacyscanner. For instance, on Debian and Ubuntu Linux you should be able to obtain all necessary files by executing:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-dev

privacyscanner is distributed via PyPI and can be easily installed using pip:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install wheel
pip install privacyscanner

Before first use, you have to download the dependencies of privacyscanner. These include the MaxMind GeoIP2 database and the Easylist adblock lists. For convenience, most dependencies can be downloaded with:

privacyscanner update_dependencies

Those dependencies will be stored in ~/.local/share/privacyscanner. In addition, google-chrome or chromium have to be installed and available in your PATH. For Debian-based systems this can be done with:

apt install chromium

Note: Due to changes in the licensing, GeoIP database of MaxMind cannot be downloaded without license key anymore. You therefore have to register an account at maxmind.com and enter your license key to your privacyscanner configuration file at ~/.config/privacyscanner/config.py as follows:

SCAN_MODULE_OPTIONS = {
    'dns': {
        'geoip_license_key': 'YOUR-LICENSE-KEY'
    }
}

For more information about the new licensing of the GeoIP database see: https://blog.maxmind.com/2019/12/18/significant-changes-to-accessing-and-using-geolite2-databases/

Usage

Scanning a single website, e.g. http://example.com/, can be done by running:

privacyscanner scan http://example.com/

It will output the scan result in Python object syntax and it will create a directory for the website in your current working directory. This directory contains the scan result as JSON file as well as associated files (e.g. the screenshot of the site) and the corresponding log files of the scan.

For more details, see privacyscanner --help and dive into the source :-)