I don't trust any apps anymore

Since I bought my fairphone two weeks ago and set it up with eOS. I don’t knwo what app I can trust and which one are spying on me. I read quit a lot here and all informations are very helpfull. But now I feel much more unsecure then at the beginig.
I think, that getting of googl ecosystem and apps will not be a big problem for me, there are tons of very good alternatives.

I’m more wondering what it means if I do download apps that I need (ebanking healt inssurance and so on) and those apps have tracker frome google/facebook in it. Dose that mean that google/facebook are spying on me all the time? If one tracker of them is on my phone then I’m infected and this whole project is for nothing?

An other example, the unifi nework app has two tracker on aurora but on apps not one. Unfortunaly on fdroid and aurora droind it is not available.

Yeah, I’m unsecure and don’t realy know how to handel apps with more than zero tracker and how bad they are. Is there a way to see how bad each tracker realy is?

4 Likes

I would say, first of all, that you shouldn’t stress too much about it. I think it’s more important to keep a healthy peace of mind rather than fighting for every last bit of privacy on your phone.

That said, you can find out which apps contain trackers with Exodus. Read through the website to learn more about what trackers are, how they work and how to avoid them.

A firewall app will allow you filter connections and record them to see which app is making them, and even block them. There are a couple of discussions on the topic using different apps: NetGuard and TrackerControl.

This is another install and forget ad-blocker you might find useful instead.

Note: I don’t think you can combine these apps together. Learn about how each works and try them for yourself.

Regardless of whether an app has trackers in it or which app store it comes from: restrict the permissions to those that are actually needed. As far as I’m aware you can’t choose which permissions to grant during installation, so you should do this immediately after. Of course this may sometimes break functionality and you should make a decision on a per-app basis, but the fewer permissions the better for your privacy and security.

You can also isolate apps with Shelter in a separate profile than the rest of the system. It will give you a little extra privacy for those apps that you absolutely need to grant sensitive permissions. There is a detailed guide to use WhatsApp under Shelter in the community that you can use as an example.

12 Likes

“If one tracker of them is on my phone then I’m infected and this whole project is for nothing?”
Basically this is true, as far as Google has Firebase Analytics, Crashlytics, etc. trackers in many apps, so if there is only one app with that tracker, Google will receive your personal details (phone model, ad id, etc.).

But regardless it is still helpful if not the whole system is contaminated by google tracking (like it’s the case with plain android). And of course it’s also important to care about tracking (block it) with usual phone activities like online browsing. Google has also trackers on websites or collects data through its services.

3 Likes

That is an important note to make sicer google also uses cookies. God forbid you visit youtube, google docs, facebook,…Those cookies will follow you every where you go and for it was tough enough to prevent them on my home computer. So I use a linux system and search only with duckduckgo and if I want to use youtube than I will use another browser. I wont let google or facebook see what I browse or search. Except for some news websites. I figure they can see that. :smiley:
Now I am slowly starting to warm up to the idea of using a smart phone. I can see I have a lot of work to do.

1 Like

There are browser extensions which remove all the cookies, cache data, history, etc. anytime you want. And if you don’t like youtube, you can use one of the invidio.us instances. Or let all the youtube links automatically open in invidio.us by an extension. On Linux there is also FreeTube. On the phone there is the Privacy Browser. Or one has to carefully check the settings in other browsers like Bromite.

2 Likes

BTW…how about a wrapper like FROST (for Facebook). Is it secure to use them on Phone? No tracking. Or? After quit app no more activities …or am I wrong?

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.