There was a person in all these days that trough some shade on Boost for tracking, but they were referring to the free version, which makes the presence of ads and tracking very clear. In the post somebody recommended the app tracking protection that comes with DuckDuckGos Browser. I downloaded it and to my surprise have had a lot of tracking attempts blocked from Boost, despite me having the payed version.
I thought I’d ask about this here first, because there might be a reasonable explanation for this. From my understanding it was made clear previously, that the payed version of boost doesn’t tack data…?
Which companies is the App Tracking Protection recording Boost connecting to?
As seen in the screenshot, for me it’s only Google. Could if be an Android thing?
Ah, that’s where DuckDuckGo is being particular unhelpful.
You can read Boost’s privacy policy by going to:
Settings > Privacy Policy
Which takes you to: https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/16063183
It mentions that Boost uses:
Firebase Crashlytics https://firebase.google.com/docs/crashlytics
Firebase Remote Config https://firebase.google.com/docs/remote-config
These are standard tools used by developers. They’re not advertising networks, they aren’t selling your data. There’s nothing nefarious about them. You can follow those links to learn more about them.
Firebase is owned by Google and these API are hosted under google domains:
So I can see why DuckDuckGo is labelling them as Google but it’s a little misleading.
It’s probably that they’re using the free tier and didn’t read any of the full screen pop-up disclosures on first launch. The ones that clearly say that you’re using ad networks to take your data.
This happens at launch. The first thing it does is check if you have a paid version, if you don’t it loads the ad networks, otherwise it just loads the program.
The ad network shows a full-screen pop-up the first time it’s started ever, this pop-up discloses the tracking.
It’s probable that they didn’t read/understand the disclosure and are seeing normal ad network traffic.