SpurioMake your commercial data profile worthless.
Spurio is an open-source browser extension that quietly floods your browser with realistic, human-like fake browsing activity, so ad-tech networks, data brokers and cross-site trackers can’t build an accurate profile of the real you. Your true behaviour gets buried in believable noise.
Everything runs on your own machine. There is no Spurio server — we never receive your accounts, your browsing, or any of your data. We can’t leak what we never get.
Read the source Read the threat model
How it works
- A background timer wakes during your active hours, inside strict limits you set.
- It opens a background tab to a site from a public, checkable list, or runs a believable decoy search.
- A small script makes that page look read: irregular scrolling, a dwell time drawn from the page’s real text length, and at most one click to another page on the same site.
- The tab closes and Spurio goes back to sleep. Nothing leaves your device.
Realism isn’t polish for later. Crude noise is trivially filtered, and a profile that filters your noise stays accurate.
What Spurio does not do
Spurio degrades commercial profiling. It is not a shield against government surveillance or lawful interception, it does not hide your IP address, it does not encrypt your traffic, and it does not stop metadata retention. For those you want a VPN/Tor and end-to-end encrypted apps — different tools, for a different problem.
We’d rather be honest about the boundary than overpromise. The full threat model spells out exactly what this works against and what it doesn’t.
Why you can verify it
No account, no collection
No signup, no email, no telemetry. Your settings stay in your browser’s local storage.
Minimal permissions
Never <all_urls>. Spurio can only reach the exact list of sites it visits — never your banking or email tabs.
Open source, GPLv3
Redistribution has to stay open, so nobody can ship a closed, tampered copy with hidden tracking bolted on.
Verifiable builds
You will be able to rebuild the published extension from this source and confirm it matches what’s in the store.
Two things that surprise people at install
“Read and change your data on 30 sites”
That is what the browser will say, and it is true. It’s the price of realism: to make a page look read, Spurio has to run a script inside the tab it just opened. Those 30 sites are exactly the contents of data/seed-sites.json in the repo — a short, public list you can diff line by line. The permission request is generated from that file at build time, so the two cannot drift apart.
You will see a tab appear and vanish
Modern browsers have no truly hidden tab. Spurio’s tab never takes focus — your active tab doesn’t change — but it is visible in the tab strip while it works. That’s not a bug.
Install
Spurio isn’t released yet. It targets the Chrome Web Store (Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers) and Firefox Add-ons. Until then, the code, the design documents and the roadmap are public.