Proxy Detector

Introduction

Proxy Detector is an Android app that detects proxies in your cellular network and tells you their impact on performance for popular Web sites. We collect the results of these measurements to help understand proxy behavior worldwide, and to make suggestions for improvement when they negatively impact your applications. The app lets users know if their carrier uses a Web proxy, and characterizes features such as caching, content rewriting, and traffic redirection.

The study is part of a Northeastern University research study whose purpose is to determine what devices in your cellular carrier are modifying your Web traffic (e.g., loading Web pages). You must be at least 18 years old to participate. We collect round trip times, object size, and object download time for the Web sites we measure. We collect absolutely no personal information, and you can opt-out of measurements to any Web site you do not wish the app to visit.

Notes

Proxy Detector will dynamically fetch websites for testing. Please be patient, as our tests take some time to complete.

To measure proxies in cellular networks, we of course need you to enable cellular network data during the experiment. We have tuned our system to consume only minimal data quota.

The entire experiment takes about 10 minutes, and you can exit at any time. However, if you do so, your results will be incomplete. We urge you to let the tests run to completion to help us better understand and improve Web proxy deployments.