outboundctl telemetry

Outbound ships a catalogue of telemetry and advertising endpoints: which vendor runs a host, what the endpoint is for, and how blocking it would affect the apps that use it. The telemetry feature uses it in the app; outboundctl telemetry gives the same facts to scripts. All three subcommands are read-only and exit 0 whether or not something matches.

Naming a host

outboundctl telemetry classify <host> [--app <signingID-or-path>] [--json]

Prints a catalogue label or a heuristic classification for a host. The first line is the classified host, or your supplied host when there is no label. The second says whether the host is on the never-block list, endpoints excluded from telemetry blocking. When the host is labelled, a third line shows the vendor’s badge, the confidence, and whether blocking it is safe enough to offer. Without a match, and not never-block, the third line is no label.

--app refines the match to one program: a value containing a slash is a path, anything else is tried as a signing identifier and then as an executable name such as node. A label can differ by app because a tracker’s impact depends on who is sending the data.

--json prints the full object: the host, neverBlock, and label (null when unmatched). A matched label includes its pattern, vendor id and name, owner, category, role, block impact, tier, confidence, whether it is blockable, the app and tool it belongs to, its badge text, a note, the user-facing switch that controls it, and the sources the entry was built from with their retrieval dates.

Showing one app’s opt-outs

outboundctl telemetry app <signingID-or-path> [--json]

Prints what the catalogue knows about one app: its name and id, whether it is a generic runtime, and each telemetry opt-out the vendor documents. For each opt-out, the command prints the concrete way to set it: an environment variable and value, a config file with format and key, a command, a defaults write invocation, or a path in the app’s own settings.

An app that is not in the catalogue prints no app. The lookup is the same as for classify: path when the value contains a slash, otherwise signing identifier first, then executable name.

Catalogue facts

outboundctl telemetry info [--json]

Prints the database version and how many vendors, endpoints and apps it contains, one labelled value per line. --json prints the same four values as an object.

For example, outboundctl telemetry classify example.com --json prints the classification object. telemetry app <signingID-or-path> --json wraps the result in app, which is null when no app matches. Bad syntax or empty required arguments exit 64; JSON encoding failures exit 1.