Manifest
Vision
Pixelscan helps people build better web bots. We are a team of cybersecurity researchers and developers who relinquished their day jobs of doom at reputable cybersecurity and anti-fraud companies to help a “John Doe next street” to earn a living or make a small business by scraping websites, collecting intelligence, and building analytics tools.
Although scraping information published online is mostly legal, websites implement comprehensive algorithms involving IP address analysis, fingerprint analysis, and human test challenges to impede gathering this information. We are on a never-ending quest of analyzing these methods, improving them, creating our own, and ultimately providing a free for all, first public and free anti-fraud system.
Mission
Our mission is to build a public browser test that identifies automated or masked browsers. We are striving to develop a one-and-done solution to detect 99.5% of bots almost instantaneously, in less than 20 milliseconds. The remaining tests that may take more time are used to achieve 99.99% accuracy in bot detection.
Along with detecting outright bots, Pixelscan may be used to recognize manually-controlled browsers with irregular connections between browser fingerprint parameters. For example, if the user-agent of a visitor displays Windows, but the rest of the parameters lead to MacOS, Pixelscan will pick up on those inconsistencies.
Inspiration
As firm advocates of internet privacy, we were originally inspired by basic tools which allow a user to check his own internet privacy profile, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick test. However, although helpful, tools such as the Panopticlick test have various flaws. For example, the Panopticlick test takes ages to run, which is unrealistic in a commercial environment. And, due to the Panopticlick test using open-source browser fingerprinting scripts, the results are often simplistic and inaccurate. Such tools should be considered more as a jumping off point to understanding internet privacy rather than a viable solution for commercial applications.
Transparency
We are all-in for transparency with our community. At no point in time we will collect, store, or process data in an obscure way without letting our users know what we are doing. However, there’s one caveat. Since we are often using detection methods researched and developed in-house, we are obfuscating or hiding our analysis methods to prevent them from being copied by commercial anti-fraud systems. We are doing for your protection to not make your game unattainably difficult.
Partnerships and cooperation
We partner up with developers of web bot application, anti-detect browsers, and all other relevant parties. This is to improve our test and share insights how such solutions can be improved. If you fall into one of these categories, feel free to reach us our over our support widget. We don’t promise fast replies since our support team is rather small. Be assured, though, we will get back to you eventually and do our best to find a way how we can collaborate in a mutually beneficial way.
No honeypots policy
Most publicly available IP, proxy, and browser fingerprint tests are, in fact, honeypots created by anti-fraud companies. We hate them as much as you do.
Will never sell your data to anti-fraud systems, period. This encompasses all our existing products and tools, likewise those that will be developed in the future.
Our business model is simple: we live from donations and from our certification system through which our partners can support Pixelscan while getting unique insights about their users passing or failing or tests. We also help our partners improving their solutions when it comes to bot detection methods. The list of our partners will soon be published on the website.
Our values
- Smart & gets it done
- Inquisitive mind
- Servant to the community
Does this list resonate with you on a deep level? Contact us and perhaps we will find an opportunity for you to join our team or otherwise collaborate with us.
Final words
We live and breath by this manifest. Should anything change in the future, we will let you know through this page.