Keep an eye on apps that phone home with Private Eye

Sometimes you just want to see what applications are phoning home, and sometimes you want to do something about it. Private Eye scans your incoming and outgoing connections and then monitors what applications are connecting to what servers.

The application is free, and can be a handy tool in weeding out nefarious or annoying applications that eat up your bandwidth. Private Eye only “sees” your network connections and reports on the traffic. It does not let you block the traffic, so if you’re hoping to stop an application from phoning home you can either purchase Radio Silence’s Radio Silence firewall ($9.00) or edit your HOSTS file in the terminal.

Private Eye will register the applications the moment they begin to send or receive connections from an external source. It’s a handy way to get a quick glimpse of what’s happening over your connection.

I’d love to see the application both register local connections as well as connections on the entire network, but for now I’ll gladly watch applications phone home on my local machine then stop them dead in their tracks.

Sadly, this one’s not on the App Store.

Hat tip to PhOBi for sending this one in to us!

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio