I set up a Raspberry Pi 3 with AdguardHome for a friend of mine, and told him to disconnect everything at home and try to watch anything on his phone, being the only device using his home’s internet.
He just sent me this, and now he’s ready to #degoogle 🤣🤣🤣
He says there were hundreds in less than 5 minutes.
Looking at how often requests happen is a red herring though. Your phone could be collecting data on you for a week and then send a single request with all of it. But I see lots people going “look how many requests” as if it was indicating anything. It’s bad that the requests are happening in the first place, but it doesn’t mean much that there are 10 requests at once or 1 request per hour.
In fact most analytics SDKs for mobile apps cache the events locally and send them in batches at some larger interval of time. And these single rarer requests are much more damaging to your privacy then lots of connectivity checks that don’t actually send any significant data.
That actually makes sense. Not that I’m happy with the constant phoning home of these a-holes, but it stands to reason that they would do that instead its way less conspicuous, so would be harder to point out as a trend.