---
published: true
layout: post
title: Why Would a Normal Person Want To Understand the API Traffic Behind Their Applications
date: 2025-04-23T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - Applications
  - Traffic
  - Proxies
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/copper-circuit-audrey-nyc-skyline.jpeg
---
I find the traffic behind our online web and mobile phone activity to interesting. [I am exploring how to use Mitmproxy to pull back the curtain on the APIs in use by the applications I depend upon](https://apievangelist.com/2025/04/22/when-applications-demand-all-the-attention-copy/). I am nerdy and enjoy the technical and system detail of our online world, so I understand that most people will be not be interested in thinking about this layer of our world. I mean people tend to not care about the electricity in their homes and the water in the faucet until they stop or begin to cost to much. So why would people care about the APIs behind their daily activity online? I figured I’d try to explore this from a variety of angles, beginning with the following areas.

- **Curious** - Some people just have a curiosity that will leave them wanting to understand how everything around them works or doesn’t work.
- **Privacy** - You have a beginning understanding that your data and information is flowing behind applications and you want to understand it.
- **Transparency** - You agree there should be a healthy amount of transparency behind how tech companies are operating their applications.
- **Automation** - There are some aspects of your online life that you want to automate and there aren’t tools readily available for you to do it.
- **Trust** - To help you have trust in the applications you depend upon you need to have more of an understanding of how applications work.
- **Right to Tinker** - You generally feel that if you buy a product you should be able tinker with it to understand how it works, and even fix it.

I don’t think this reflects everyone out there. This is definitely a specific type of person who is used to thinking about the world around them. I will keep working to craft projects and stories with this target audience in mind. But this list reflects my own personality, and I want to do the work to reach beyond this and find reasons why a normal person could be made more interested in pulling back the curtain. Some of those reasons might fall into these areas, but I am positive there are numerous other reasons why people will care about what is happening behind the applications they use, I just haven’t found them yet, and will need to keep storytelling to uncover and identify them.