No, there’s no guarantees Advanced Privacy gets them all, you need to try and check for yourself.
You may use PCAPdroid in parallel to doublecheck or some other app like netguard or personaldnsfilter to back up AP’ s tracker blocker…
Not very reliable in this case I assume, the app may not collect it but obviously allows others to do so (?)
It depends on the app. When you are already familiar with Rethink DNS you can let it block everything. This should be safe.
But when your app needs web access it gets complicated. You can then configure a whitelist or similar, but administrating these allowed servers can be difficult because of again and again changing addresses. It’s also not so easy to decide which one is needed and which one is crap.
I for myself do this only with one concrete app I can’t relinquish (Coros).
Any app that is not open source and does not ask you to pay is generating money on selling your private data to anyone interested, not just for advertisement, their clients are very often insurance companies, governments and criminal organisations indistinctly. Actually, the data brokers do not really know or care to know to whom they sell those data.
The profit generated by selling your data is usually higher than if the app was chargeable, hence there is a high incentive to install those automated trackers for any app developers, including official government apps that do not realise how that money is generated and to whom the data is sold.
But what is more important than the visible trackers in advanced privacy is the data that is sold directly by the app editor himself or from their server side to a data broker. Meaning wour data will not go through a tracker (data broker network if one want). It is convenient for a small app developer to implement a third-parrty tracker on the app side because it is less time consuming to integrate than to do it on the server side, but as of now, more and more apps are sending their users’ data to third parties directly from their server side.
Why and what difference does it make for us ? → advanced privacy, like web-browser tracker blockers, is only able to check the client network traffic and to block all requests made to domains referenced as trackers. This mechanism is not possible when an app is sending your data from their server …
Even more obvious, most google applications have only a few trackers, because they obviously do not need external/third-party trackers to collect and send your data as they are themselves a data broker.
So, using advanced privacy is only informative but it is not protecting you. What protects you is not use any application edited by google (waze etc), and limit yourself to a few open source apps and governments apps, ideally accessed through a web browser (with ublock and privacy badger) and not through an app itself.
Do you realize that the whole trend on sports/health data collection was developed only as a new way to get more intimate data to sell ? The marketing argument that monitoring yourself is good for health is , in that case, really only a marketing argument well conceived beforehand. If you want to monitor your performance or health, be extremely careful about the hardware and software that you use. You may use a normal bicycle speed and distance meter that is NOT linked to the cloud, or use Osmand~ gpx recording for many kinds of sport. But do not send the .gpx file to a “metrics” website like strava or else, because their business model is simply to identify you (to make your data more valuable) and sell your very intimate data to anyone who wants it.
Do you want an insurance company to know that you had a costly disease in the past ? or a criminal organization to know on which street you are running every evening and on which bench you read a book every Friday ?
When living in a democracy, it is not obvious how problematic it can be if public officers have access to our intimate data. Imagine that in a corrupted country, administrations and policemen have access to all your messages content… (yes) health and location data, then it becomes incredibly easy for them to exclude you from some state benefits (right to register to a university, to buy a property, to pay the fair amount of taxes, etc) or worse blackmail and racket you. They can even automatize it.
Wow. Thank you for that extensive and detailed answer!
Ever since starting using /e/ I have more and more come to realize how awfull the word “free” is. Even though I already had quite some life experience, to see how big tech thinks it is easier to sell our data and sensitive info than their own souls. To each their own point of view.
It is sad to see how much people accept everything, without thinking.
I find I use my phone a lot less now that I use the least possible apps with trackers.
I use the watch to motivate myself to keep improving.
I have not created an account, not even one not linked to my identity. When connected to the internet, it is connected through a vpn. And on my phone i use gadgetbridge, not the app they want me to use.
I am looking for a watch I could install AsteroidOS on, but they’re not easy to find.
If you root your phone, you could for instance use Tracker Control. That might not block anything, but definitely gives you more control. If you want an overview of what TC is blocking in one single app (NU. nl)… I made some screenshots:
But nu.nl might be one of the worst apps out there.
I use two devices, one as primary phone, the second with the least connections to my identity.
Unfortunately, i need waze for navigation as I often need up-to-date traffic information. That’s what I need the second device for. Not using that on my primary device.
I know Nu.nl is a nightmare. But with some other root-apps it’s quite manageable to control it. There are some downsides: videos don’t work, but I can live with that.
I use only one device, so everything is there. I don’t use Waze, though. Sometimes Google Maps, but of course not logged-in (as I don’t have a Google-account). It works anyway.
You can use RethinkDNS together with a VPN, if your VPN supports Wireguard(and maybe other protocols) you con configure it in Rethink, go to Proxy->Wireguard.
See also: WireGuard | RethinkDNS Docs
As described in the message, Advanced privacy can only block the traffic coming out of the client side (phone terminal). But if you install google maps app, the few client-side trackers that it has will be blocked but it won’t prevent google to store and sell all your location data to anybody as well as identify you through many methods that do not even need you to have a google account (device registration ID needed for Google-push-notifications, etc).
Same for whatsapp. Advanced privacy will not prevent whatsapp to sell the content of all your messages to anybody because that content is not leaked through a client/phone-side tracker but by the app itself.
Advanced privacy is an excellent addition, but it only slightly reduces our exposure to being some goods to be sold. European parliament is very aware of all this, murena foundation is contributing to their information.
There is already a law (not having any effect unfortunately) to force messaging apps to open their protocol and network.
The same will maybe happen with the app stores as Gaël mentionned it (the current law is actually enough).
Next will be a law to cut the monopoly on “push” notifications going through google servers. As always, it is complex, alternatives already exist but are not chosen by developers because of the size of google on that market. Hence the word “Gatekeeper” used by EU.
Thanks for clarifying. As you say, advanced privacy can only do so much. Even using ad blockers, etc., in web browsers doesn’t stop our data making its way to third parties. We have to be vigilant with anything we sign up to if we value our privacy. I recently found out that the Privacy Policies of two of my banks leaves room for them to provide data to others “for their own uses”, and one names Google and Facebook explicitly. It is not my bank any more!
Does the app work without internet connection?
I use some devices from Withings and the app but blocked network for it so i have the data local on my smartphone, maybe that works?
