The tool Website Evidence Collector (WEC) automates the website evidence collection of storage and transfer of personal data. It is based on the browser Chromium/Chrome and its JavaScript software library for automation puppeteer.
- The Website Evidence Collector is a set of scripts written in JavaScript for execution by Node.js. Install Node.js and the Node.js package manager (NPM). The minimum version for Node.js is 14.0.
- Windows or Mac: Follow the guide on https://nodejs.org/en/.
- Linux: use the Linux package manager to install Node.js, e.g.
zypper in nodejs10
(check version) orapt install nodejs
.
- Install the Website Evidence Collector from
- the tarball archive file (
*.tar.gz
) downloaded from the EDPS Website:npm install --global ./website-evidence-collector-*.tar.gz
(with*
to be replaced by the current release version), - Github with
npm install --global https://github.com/EU-EDPS/website-evidence-collector/tarball/latest
, or - Github with
npm install --global https://github.com/EU-EDPS/website-evidence-collector/tarball/master
to get a potentially broken testing version, which includes the latest changes.
The tool can be uninstalled with npm uninstall --global website-evidence-collector
.
Hint: You don't need root permissions for the installation. If you run into permission denied errors during step 2 of the installation try the following commands:
mkdir "${HOME}/.npm-packages"
npm config set prefix "${HOME}/.npm-packages"
Now repeat step 2.
To start the collection for e.g. https://example.com, open the terminal and run website-evidence-collector https://example.com
. The folder output
contains the gathered evidence.
Notice on the Processing of Personal Data: This tool carries out automated processing of data of websites for the purpose of identifying their processing of personal data. If you run the tool to visit web pages containing personal data, this tool will download, display, and store these personal data in the form of text files and screenshots, and you will therefore process personal data.
Hint:
If you run into command not found errors you have to add the .npm-packages
to your PATH
.
Run the following commands:
NPM_PACKAGES="${HOME}/.npm-packages"
export PATH="$PATH:$NPM_PACKAGES/bin"
You can check your PATH
with this command: echo $PATH
.
website-evidence-collector --no-output --yaml https://example.com 2> /dev/null
The last part 2> /dev/null
works on Mac/Linux and redirects the logging output from the screen into a device for disregarding the content.
website-evidence-collector -y -q https://untrusted-root.badssl.com -- --ignore-certificate-errors
All command line arguments after --
(the second in case of npm
) are applied to launch Chromium.
Reference: https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/#ignore-certificate-errors
Note: Testssl.sh v3.0 or higher must be already installed. The most recent and with WEC tested version is v3.0.6.
With the option --testssl
, the website evidence collector calls testssl.sh
to gather information about the HTTPS/SSL connection.
website-evidence-collector -q --testssl https://example.com
The tool assumes the executable testssl.sh
can be found in the PATH
variable. The option --testssl-executable
allows to specify the location and implies the option testssl
.
website-evidence-collector -q --testssl-executable ../testssl.sh-3.0.6/testssl.sh https://example.com
If testssl.sh
is called separately, the JSON output file can be integrated subsequently with the option --testssl-file
.
website-evidence-collector -q --testssl-file example-testssl.json https://example.com
Please find a collection of frequently asked questions with answers in FAQ.md
- Install the dependencies according to the Installation Guide point 1.
- Install the version control system Git (https://git-scm.com/).
- Download the Website Evidence Collector
a. from the EDPS Website and unpack the received folder with e.g. 7zip, or
b. from Github with
git clone https://github.com/EU-EDPS/website-evidence-collector
. - Open the terminal and navigate to the folder
website-evidence-collector
. - Install the dependencies using
npm install
- Consider to use
npm link
to make the commandwebsite-evidence-collector
outside of the project folder.
- some recorded HTTP cookies have not yet information on their origin (log data)
- fix bugs in HAR creation and verify accuracy, see https://github.com/Everettss/puppeteer-har/issues and New HAR page doesn't appear to be created upon navigation chrome-har#19
- improve reproducibility by employing only RNG with optionally provided seed, see: No mechanism to use seeded random generation lodash#3289
- optionally store web pages matching the keywords in markdown format, see https://justmarkup.com/articles/2019-01-04-using-puppeteer-to-crawl-pages-and-save-them-as-markdown-files/
- puppeteer does not fully support PDF and downloads, so that if
--max
is used to browse random links, the script skips links to content with different mime type thantext/html
and scans effectively less pages - client-side redirects using e.g.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;URL='https://example.com'"/>
are followed, but not mentioned in the output - in releases after v1.0.0, the option
--quiet
has no effect any longer – instead debug output is printed to STDERR and can only be disregarded with2> /dev/null
- the library
got
does not support therequire()
syntax anylonger since version 12; it seems all use ofrequire()
must be migrated toimport
for all packages
The following software extends WEC to cover further use cases. It is developed independently of the WEC and is not tested or approved by the WEC developers.
- Test Runner to automated Website Evidence Collector for continuous testing https://github.com/perploug/wec-testrunner
- A tool to launch website-evidence-collector on several URLs or Sitemaps and generate a full report https://github.com/ovh/website-evidence-collector-batch
- A tool that incorporates many ideas of the WEC (but not the WEC itself) to analyse websites https://github.com/the-markup/blacklight-collector
- Dashboard to monitor several sites of your organisation for privacy requirements like third parties, cookies and just plain privacy violators https://github.com/vincentcox/privacy-dashboard
- puppeteer sandbox online: https://puppeteersandbox.com/
- opensource puppeteer sandbox: https://github.com/ebidel/try-puppeteer, online at https://try-puppeteer.appspot.com/
- puppeteer API documentation: https://pptr.dev/
- puppeteer examples: https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-examples
- puppeteer with chrome-as-a-service: https://github.com/joelgriffith/browserless
- stacktrace.js documentation: https://www.stacktracejs.com/#!/docs/stacktrace-js
- Chrome DevTools Protocol Documentation: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
Use of Hooks for Restructuring Source Code:
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/before-after-hook
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/promised-hooks
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/grappling-hook
- Robert Riemann (European Data Protection Supervisor, initial author)
- Company BitnessWise https://www.bitnesswise.com/ (code to preset cookies, bug fixes)
- Roland Schilling (DPA Hamburg)
- Company Avast https://www.avast.com (store page source code in output folder #68)
- Per Ploug (Zalando) https://opensource.zalando.com/ (refactor code base for modularity)
This work, excluding filter lists, is distributed under the European Union Public Licence (the ‘EUPL’). Please find the terms in the file LICENSE.txt.
Filter lists in the assets/
directory are authored by the EasyList authors (https://easylist.to/) and are for your convenience distributed together with this work under their respective license as indicated in their file headers.