Advanced Privacy

Thanks @Dave1 for replying :+1:.

You’re right and apologise for that. I missed up location and IP address, as you can choose from which country on my VPN (ProtonVPN) my internet address / IP address is supposed to come.

So, location within Advanced Privacy is the GPS location and it is for Apps that are interested to access your location and forward it “home” ?

Then, if I’m not mistaken and to summarize, if all features from Advanced Privacy are enabled and the VPN is on with rerouting from another country (IP-wise) :

  • The location will be the one from Advanced privacy, as you said ;

  • The IP address will be the one from the VPN.

Of course, supposedly if you’re GPS is on, on the device. If switched to off, no affect right ?

I’m assuming the Advance Privacy location setting only affects ip and not GPS location, but I haven’t tested it.

For what I see in my case, I can access to geo-blocked content from France from my phone with the following setting :

  • VPN to a french server ;
  • Location, from Advanced Privacy, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

My conclusion is that with both enabled, the location is extract from the IP location rather than the one selected within Advance Privacy.

Same problem here! But it’s a quite exciting new feature

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The fake geolocation does in fact change your GPS coordinants

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All I can tell you is Microsoft Outlook hates Advanced Privacy. They just forced me to recover my Outlook acct. and change my password. Which now means I have to relogin to Outlook on many other devices.

The problem is I don’t know which apps or services might be effected by Adv. Privacy and on a phone some things need to just work for business and emergencies. I appreciate the effort with Adv. Privacy but I don’t need it that badly.

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@Brad
That is what happens when you sign-in to many services over Tor: blocked, forced to verify, or banned.
I haven’t tried AP myself but if there is not a VERY CLEAR message that it uses Tor, users are going to get hurt.

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I believe that it is not only here that it becomes visible what a huge task the few people at Murena have tackled with “Advanced Privacy”!

After all, Murena stands with its OS against a whole world full of billionaire tech corporations - and their interests!

I think eOS is a great step into a new direction - for me one of the greatest IT innovations (in the interest of the user!) since the invention of Linux and Open Source!

For me the approach is successful - I look forward to further developments and hope that your mission will be successful!

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I agree with you. It just works. Luckily I don’t use nay of the big corpo stuff, so my work flow is the same as before, just more private and informative. I love the statistics how many trackers have been blocked…
Good work and I look forward in updates of it :slight_smile:

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I’m fully in line. It’s a great step in the good direction, but spoofing location activated means no use of nav system (or any app which needs a real location). From my point of view location spoofing will be useful when it could be activated on an app basis not for the whole system as today.

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I fully agree, this is a great step forward.

Like other I would wish the option to activate the tracker blocking function separately (so my mapping app can still show me where I am) but already there I feel like asking too much given the quality of the work presented in v1.0

It is nice to read the possibility to use a vpn is possible with ap turned on.

I would like a bit more clarity about this feature and how it works. Do all three options - location, IP address and tracker blocking all rely on some kind of VPN function?

Like others, I don’t (always) want to spoof my location since I use the Maps app sometimes, and I also want to use my own VPN from time to time. However I would love to block the trackers!

I also don’t particularly want my data speed reduced.

Is there any further info on what this is and how it works?

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Or if it could be temporarily get deactivated

I’m liking Advanced Privacy so far but I echo what Nick1 said about requiring more information about how it actually works behind the scenes. SkewedZepplin’s post about it using an old version of Tor and Orbot is interesting, but I’d also like to know about how the IP-spoofing feature works - is it a VPN, or is that Tor too? Presumably a newer version of Tor will get built into it at some point…?

Also, on that last point about IP-spoofing, on my phone (Fairphone 3, Android Q) I can’t turn the “Manage my Internet address” feature on. When I turn Advanced Privacy off, I can select “Hide my real IP address”, but when I turn it back on it flicks back to “Use my real IP address” and won’t let me choose anything else. My IP address therefore remains “Exposed”.
The other features work fine – trackers seem to be blocked and my geolocation is spoofed.
I also use Shelter and have a work profile set up, and Advanced Privacy works perfectly in there – IP spoofing and everything else runs like a dream out of the box.

It would also be nice if it used something open-source instead of Mapbox, but :person_shrugging:

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Thanks @anon88181694 I’m pretty much a mainstream user so I don’t need the level of protection that Advanced Privacy provides, but I can see where people in other professions and other countries might find it very much needed. So I’m glad it is there, but it should have a warning about which functions might screw up mainstream services like Outlook.

Advanced Privacy also caused Twitter on the web browser to think I was a robot and sent me into a continuous Captcha loop until I turned AP off.

About the location spoofing, wouldn’t it be better if one could at least choose a region, I would prefer for websites/apps to think I am somewhere in the EU so that its legislation applies. Right now it’s a lot of fun that I appear to be in Quezon City but I fear it might bring other issues with it.

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One of the most annoying and insulting things ever devised! And one which no doubt benefits Google in some nefarious way.

Unfortunately, nearly every website willingly and unquestioningly implements Google’s various spyware tools and subjects us to them.

(But I digress!)

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You can. Mine was initially set in the Philippines and I moved the map to the US. And I could move it to anywhere.

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I wonder if /e/ Advanced Privacy will ever implement SMS encryption into their SMS, like iMessage, except using the Signal protocol by default.

The location spoofing is little bit buggy. Even, I choose to use my real location it doesn’t find my location. Weather widget shows weather of some philippines city. But, when I empty mozilla unifiednlp backend memory and start osmand+, go to outside and let osmand find my gps location the weather widget finds my real location. But still, advanced privacy keeps searching my location (wheel spins, no map appears).

But, this had to be done again today, because the weather showed philippines this morning again. And there for my Garmin watch showed philippines weather.

Hide my ip has been on all the time, because I love this built in Orbot in the new Advanced Privacy feature!!

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