NoisyCompany

A lightweight, bandwidth-aware network noise generator with coherent decoy personas.

noisycompany runs quietly in the background and adds plausible, low-volume browsing and DNS activity to your connection, so that what a network observer (ISP, public Wi-Fi operator, DNS resolver, router vendor) sees about you is diluted by interests that are not yours.

It is a ground-up rewrite of the idea behind 1tayH/noisy (GPL-3.0), designed around three constraints the original did not have:

1. Be honest about what noise can and cannot do (see threat model).
2. Be featherweight: a few MB per day by default, hard caps, pauses when you use your bandwidth, sleeps at night (see impact).
3. Be hard to filter out: stable personas instead of uniform randomness, one consistent user agent, human-like pacing.

NoisyCompany is a complement, not a replacement, for blocking. To stop targeted advertising, first use a content blocker (uBlock Origin), encrypted DNS and a browser that resists fingerprinting. NoisyCompany then lowers the value of what still leaks at network level. Read what NoisyCompany does not do.

Features

• Personas: 10 built-in harmless interest profiles (gardening, astronomy, chess...), 3 active at a time, rotated every 10 days from a local secret salt.
• DNS noise through your system resolver (~300 bytes per lookup).
• Polite HTTP browsing: robots.txt honoured, per-host delay, responses truncated at 192 KB, text/HTML only (no images, video, scripts), no ad, login or payment URL ever.
• Hard budget: daily MB cap, actions per hour cap, budget spread over the day.
• Netwatch (Linux): backs off while your own traffic exceeds 400 kbit/s.
• Human schedule: active hours, exponential gaps between sessions, reading time.
• noisycompany estimate: data, energy and CO2e per month before you run anything.
• Zero runtime dependency: Python standard library only, ~1000 lines with comments, easy to audit.
• On/off switches for every roadmap item (noisycompany features, or buttons in the local dashboard): persona drift, French persona pack, metered-link guard, DNS over HTTPS, Prometheus metrics, labelled ground-truth log for SOC testing, household privacy report, reviewed persona packs, business traffic profiles for SOC labs, realistic request trees, and more planned.
• Appliances: Home Assistant add-on, docker-compose, Raspberry Pi installer, OpenWrt service, multi-arch image, noisycompany health.
• Collective noise: households share a short code and rotate the same decoys.
• noisycompany study: measures how separable the noise is from your real traffic (ROC AUC), see docs/STUDY.md.
• Firefox companion (companion/): the same rare decoy visits made by your real browser, so they share its network fingerprint. Off by default.
• noisycompany privacy: local score of what really protects you (blocker, encrypted DNS, fingerprinting protection...), with advice. Nothing is sent.
• --dry-run mode, hardened systemd user unit, non-root Docker image.

Quick start

pipx install noisycompany   # or: pip install noisycompany
noisycompany estimate                # what will it cost?
noisycompany run --dry-run --once    # what would it do? (no network)
noisycompany run                     # go

Default (balanced) estimate:

Data/day (expected)      : ~15 MB (hard cap 15 MB)
Average rate when active : ~2.2 kbit/s
Equivalent HD video/day  : ~18 s
Network energy/month     : 2.3 to 27 Wh

Presets: eco (~2 MB/day, DNS-heavy), balanced (~15 MB/day), max (~60 MB/day).

noisycompany config --print-default > noisycompany.toml   # edit, then
noisycompany run -c noisycompany.toml

Switches and dashboard

noisycompany features                   # every roadmap item, with its state
noisycompany features on dashboard      # then open http://127.0.0.1:9788
noisycompany features on locale_packs   # add persona packs in your language (fr, de, es, it)
noisycompany privacy                    # local privacy score and advice
noisycompany packs install photography  # reviewed persona pack, then:
noisycompany features on persona_marketplace

As a service

cp deploy/systemd/noisycompany.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user enable --now noisycompany

Docker, Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, OpenWrt

docker compose up -d                                   # docker-compose.yml
bash deploy/raspberrypi/install.sh                      # read it first; eco preset

Home Assistant: add this repository as an add-on repository, install NoisyCompany (deploy/homeassistant/). Also:

The dashboard is in English and French (browser language, or ?lang=fr).

--network host lets netwatch see your real traffic; without it, only the budget applies.

Documentation

Commands

Security and privacy

No telemetry, no account, no server. Every URL and redirect must stay on the persona's domains and resolve to public IPs only, so a hostile site cannot aim your traffic at your LAN. State files are private (0700/0600). Details: PRIVACY.md, audit, SECURITY.md.

Images from 2.1 on carry a signed build provenance. Check it before running:

gh attestation verify oci://ghcr.io/socold/noisycompany:v2.2.0 -R Socold/NoisyCompany

Responsible use

noisycompany only reads public pages, at human pace, and honours robots.txt. It never clicks ads (that would be click fraud in many jurisdictions), never submits forms, never logs in. Do not raise the limits to levels that put load on small sites. On a shared or employer network, the generated traffic is visible and attributable to you: check the rules first.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE. Inspired by 1tayH/noisy (GPL-3.0); no code was reused.