my apologies for the long screenshot. i had purchased adguard’s vpn service for five years since its primary adguard service is well know in the iapple ecosystem.

on android, though, their app appears to send data to a lot of third-parties. has it always been this compromised? am i a fool to go for their vpn services as well?

  • @[email protected]
    14•9 months ago

    You are using that Duckduckgo thing which is not a reliable source of information.

    I would be interested in what a “tracking attempt” would look like.

    Your VPN sees EVERYTHING you connect to, if you use HTTPS that is not a big deal but can help target stuff to your usage.

    If it is tracking or just traffic passthrough is decided on their servers, which no weird Duckduckgo app can access.

    • @ohwhatfollyismanOP
      2•9 months ago

      i get what you’re saying, but the vpn was inactive when the app sent these requests. DDG was active at the time and using the VPN slot.

      so it isn’t the vpn functionality, per se, of the app that’s doing anything here.

      • @[email protected]
        3•9 months ago

        Thanks, I think it is very relevant to understand how this DDG VPN “tracker blocking” works.

        If it is about an app sending requests to lots of domains, this may have many reasons. For example it could check the IP addresses of all these tracking serverers to block apps from communicating with them via IP and not URLs.

        This would be a reason that a trusted app connects to tracking servers to update their internal filterlist.

        This “known to collect” seems to be unrelated to the actual connection, just “this service often collects data about x”.

        If this is true, that is HIGHLY misleading and please update your post to explain that possibility.

        • @ohwhatfollyismanOP
          2•9 months ago

          this is a possibility. one that i haven’t accounted for.

          but is there any literature that verifies this? the closest I’ve found in context is this page, and I’m not able to resolve what you’re saying with whats on there: https://adguard.com/kb/general/ad-filtering/filter-policy/

          i don’t have enough info yet to update the post with this conjecture.

          • @[email protected]
            2•9 months ago

            You need to contact them, if they connect to known to-be-blocked sites to get their IPs.

            Googerteller does this:

            Note: Find it ironic or not, but to query the list of all Google IPs/subnets, this needs to contact one Google domain, actually. (That request does not emit a sound, though.)

            And I would ask DDG how their “tracker blocker” works and if it would also block such requests.0