Global Traceroute is a service of Link Level Consulting LLC, a California Limited Liablity Company. It is a free tool intended for use in troubleshooting Internet routing.
We log certain information when you use our system. That information includes the information entered on our registration form if you have a user account, where you connect from, the measurements you conduct using our system, and the results of those measurements. We use that information to show you your own past measurements, and may use it for various internal purposes.
We transmit your measurement queries to the RIPE NCC so that they can perform your measurements on their Atlas servers. They have access to the results they send back, and per their terms of service may make the measurement data public.
We will not sell data about our users or their measurements to outside parties.
RIPE Atlas is a public Internet measurement system, operated by the RIPE NCC. Global Traceroute acts as a simplified front-end to RIPE Atlas. Global Traceroute has no affiliation with RIPE Atlas or the RIPE NCC, and interacts with RIPE Atlas soley through its public API.
RIPE Atlas's status as a public data source extends to making results of other users' measurements visible in their database, unless the measurements are marked as private. Historically, Global Traceroute has marked its measurements as private, but we are no longer doing so. As of Global Traceroute version 2.6, all Global Traceroute queries are going into the Atlas database as public queries, available to be seen by others who search for them.
RIPE Atlas has two APIs that can be used to retrieve results, a "back end database API," and a "streaming API." The back end database API allows querying public or private measurement results, but it gets bogged down and sometimes fails to make results available until long after the query was performed. This has led to considerable reliability challenges for Global Traceroute. The "streaming API" delivers results in real time, and is much better suited to Global Traceroute's operational model. However, it only works with public measurements. This left us with a choice between reliablity and privacy, and finding that the reliability challenges of the back end database API had become too significant, we chose to sacrifice privacy instead.
We are considering making private queries an option as part of Global Traceroute Pro. If this would be of interest to you, please contact [email protected].