Route all or traffic through tor. Never log into anything. Never use the same identity twice. Ahh and live in a hut in the woods never going to shops or cities that have security cameras.
Same, same. But the occasional app refusing to work due to missing Play services, all the Instagram posts everyone except me took notice of, and all the hoops I have to jump through, kind of remind me of that regularly.
Just comes with the downside that I can’t take part in every day life, talk to my friends, stay connected with old friends, borrow an electric bicycle, transfer money easily… I have to drive to a shop only to see it’s closed and they posted that on Instagram… I mean there’s a whole world out there which I don’t just want to disconnect from and become some sort of hermit…
Google hardcodes DNS into their hardware appliances…
So you’d need to block outgoing DNS requests except for your DNS server and god forbid you change location with a smartphone.
I think this is about apps and not the operating system. But yeah, the stock ROMs also phone home to Google. You’d need to patch that. For example like custom ROMs like GrapheneOS do. I don’t see another viable alternative. But that still leaves you with the issues with the apps mentioned in the article.
I think it’s unlikely that they mess with people’s DNS settings. That would just break lots of stuff and internet would stop working for a small amount of people. But there are things like certificate pinning and probably similar things for DNS. We nowadays often circumvent DNS servers and use DOH on an application level. Plus there are things like connectivity checks (made for public wifi portals etc), AGPS… that all connect to Google servers… Well, unless you have that changed, as I said. But that’s not something the user can change. You need the whole operating system re-built with different servers in place.
Using firefox in strict mode with ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, and a VPN to change your IP every now and then should stop location tracking and cross-site tracking. Sites will still know you’ve visited them and what pages you’ve been to in that session, but that is impossible to stop.
The main thing is don’t use apps, they can collect tons of data and tie it directly to your physical device, and run in the background while not actively using it.
Using a web browser is really the safest option I can think of because you have control over almost everything.
I imagine an ad blocker could prevent this data going out, unless the hosts were generic and the game/app simply won’t work without allowing those connections. I’ve never seen an app be [obviously] broken from my ad blocker but I am interested in running a similar experiment to see just how much data is going out.
Use a custom DNS and/or hosts file. You can cut them off the grid by blocking data upload to SSP. Don’t install many apps, for games that can be played offline, play them offline.
EDIT: AdGuard DNS doesn’t block the 1st URL (o.isx…) in the page. 2nd URL is blocked.
Is there any straightforward way of stopping this besides dropping off the grid?
Route all or traffic through tor. Never log into anything. Never use the same identity twice. Ahh and live in a hut in the woods never going to shops or cities that have security cameras.
I think it’s more: “Don’t use a smartphone”. It’ll send those requests through any internet connection. No matter if it’s a VPN or Tor.
I forgot I’m in a minority of people running a properly secure degoogled ROM.
Same, same. But the occasional app refusing to work due to missing Play services, all the Instagram posts everyone except me took notice of, and all the hoops I have to jump through, kind of remind me of that regularly.
@hendrik @muntedcrocodile then don’t use that app. Done.
Just comes with the downside that I can’t take part in every day life, talk to my friends, stay connected with old friends, borrow an electric bicycle, transfer money easily… I have to drive to a shop only to see it’s closed and they posted that on Instagram… I mean there’s a whole world out there which I don’t just want to disconnect from and become some sort of hermit…
Google hardcodes DNS into their hardware appliances…
So you’d need to block outgoing DNS requests except for your DNS server and god forbid you change location with a smartphone.
I think this is about apps and not the operating system. But yeah, the stock ROMs also phone home to Google. You’d need to patch that. For example like custom ROMs like GrapheneOS do. I don’t see another viable alternative. But that still leaves you with the issues with the apps mentioned in the article.
I wouldnt be surprised if Google hardcoded DNS servers even if you override it with a “private dns”
I think it’s unlikely that they mess with people’s DNS settings. That would just break lots of stuff and internet would stop working for a small amount of people. But there are things like certificate pinning and probably similar things for DNS. We nowadays often circumvent DNS servers and use DOH on an application level. Plus there are things like connectivity checks (made for public wifi portals etc), AGPS… that all connect to Google servers… Well, unless you have that changed, as I said. But that’s not something the user can change. You need the whole operating system re-built with different servers in place.
…where are chains allowed to abuse security camera footage for ad tracking?
Bunnings in Australia until very recently and u have basically 0 protections in the states.
Using firefox in strict mode with ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, and a VPN to change your IP every now and then should stop location tracking and cross-site tracking. Sites will still know you’ve visited them and what pages you’ve been to in that session, but that is impossible to stop.
The main thing is don’t use apps, they can collect tons of data and tie it directly to your physical device, and run in the background while not actively using it.
Using a web browser is really the safest option I can think of because you have control over almost everything.
I imagine an ad blocker could prevent this data going out, unless the hosts were generic and the game/app simply won’t work without allowing those connections. I’ve never seen an app be [obviously] broken from my ad blocker but I am interested in running a similar experiment to see just how much data is going out.
Use a custom DNS and/or hosts file. You can cut them off the grid by blocking data upload to SSP. Don’t install many apps, for games that can be played offline, play them offline. EDIT: AdGuard DNS doesn’t block the 1st URL (o.isx…) in the page. 2nd URL is blocked.
None worth pursuing