How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.
cross-posted from: https://fed.dyne.org/post/380551
You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 124 users / day
- 1.05K users / week
- 1.3K users / month
- 4.58K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3.36K Posts
- 85.5K Comments
- Modlog
Horrific read!
Yet another reason why I use F-Droid and RethinkDNS with “Block newly installed apps by default” in the universal firewall rules enabled.
Only the absolute neccessary apps that I can’t live without (like my Swedish bank’s app) will be installed from Play Store.
Additionally, you can set Android to use an ad-blocking DNS server without apps. In Settings > Network & Internet > DNS, select “Private DNS” and set the hostname to a custom server, like base.dns.mullvad.net (Mullvad’s DNS server is free to the public, does not require a VPN subscription).
The per-app controls sound neat! I might give that a try. Google killed the ability to restrict apps’ network access years ago, specifically so ads would always work. I’ve never tried a local VPN as a workaround.
That works too, if you don’t use the DNS within RethinkDNS. At the moment, I subscribe to over 100 lists that mainly blocks ads.
deleted by creator
Yepp. I have used the Wireshark servers from Mullvad VPN for at least 1 year in RethinkDNS now. Works flawlessly.