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.
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- 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
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- 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 :)
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i had the same problem till i configured private dns to “adblock.dns.mullvad.net”
How to prevent DNS leaks ☞ https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-leaks
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Do make sure
Block connections without VPN
is enabled. I know ProtonVPN had issues with leaks in the past, but it’s been resolved. I don’t know if it was only resolved for GrapheneOS devices, or ProtonVPN as a whole. You may look into Orbot if you’re willing to put up with the slow network speeds, to fully lock down any leaks from the VPN side.Where did you find this out? I’m assuming from your DNS provider, but which one do you use?
This is reasonable, but it won’t protect you if no DNS query is made in the first place (i.e. directly connecting to the IP address, rather than a domain name). In this case, however, it looks like it is creating a DNS query, but be careful because DNS based filtering isn’t magic. If you pay for ProtonVPN (or Mullvad VPN, which is a better VPN in my opinion) you can have greater control over what gets blocked.
Thanks for the information, and that’s unfortunate. I’ve messed around debloating cheap Android phones, but you can barely scratch the surface from a user standpoint.
dnsotls-ds.metric.gstatic.com is a Google-owned domain, used for DNS over TLS. I don’t know much about it, as I don’t use a custom DNS provider, but check if your DNS provider is using Google’s DNS as a backend or a fallback. That may be where it’s coming from.
Check IronFox’s DNS settings, and set a custom DNS over TLS server, if you’d like.
Since you’re using a custom DNS, this likely isn’t a VPN leak, but more likely a DNS leak. If you want to simplify things, using your VPN’s DNS can help prevent misconfigured custom DNS solutions, so it reduces the risk of a leak. This will remove some of the filtering you have in place, though.
It seems your threat model is hiding traffic from your ISP, minimizing telemetry, and using as much open source software as possible. If you prioritize only hiding traffic from your ISP, using your VPN’s DNS would achieve this, but there are known cases (especially on iOS) of the system bypassing the VPN and connecting directly anyways.
Best of luck!
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I’ve never had a captcha with DuckDuckGo, if you want to give that a try. Otherwise, metasearch engines like SearXNG act as a proxy between you and other search engines.
Good to know. It’s up to you whether you want to trade privacy for convenience.
GrapheneOS’s browser Vanadium is a good option if you want to move away from Firefox-based browsers, but it’s not easy to install anywhere other than GrapheneOS. If you’re up to try, here’s how.
Brave can be hardened to minimize most of those, but I agree it is annoying that there are still background connections.
Besides Google being able to see every time you ping the domain, there’s not much else going on. It’s unlikely that it’s leaking any private data, so it’s relatively harmless. It’s not ideal that it connects to it, but it doesn’t pose too large of a threat.
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