- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
An amazing bit of digital detective work here. Seems like Linux mobile is your only off ramp from being exhaustively tracked
An amazing bit of digital detective work here. Seems like Linux mobile is your only off ramp from being exhaustively tracked
All HTTP requests include your ip address, you don’t “consent” to giving it to anybody. You can geolocate somebody based on ip address but it won’t be very accurate
Use a VPN. Problem solved.
Make sure you disable or properly configure webrtc. Even with a VPN it will leak your true IP address.
Check here.
https://browserleaks.com/webrtc
Using a VPN just moves the trust to another middleman.
Is that tinfoil hat comfortable?
Using a VPN means that all your traffic is routed through a possibly malicious actor.
Tor over VPN
So use a trustworthy middleman? Surely you can find someone more trustworthy than advertising companies?
You can set up wireguard vpn on a tiny instance in Amazon or Google, and bounce traffic through that one. Then you control what gets logged (Amazon may have logs over all outgoing connections from all instances somewhere though).
You can even make it change it’s public ip every day if you want.
Yeah, a middleman you get to choose. That’s a huge improvement. There are plenty of trustworthy VPN providers.
Not the magic bullet people think they are. Oh, and you can’t turn it off, so you’ll have to take the loss in network speed on absolutely everything. And better know how to configure each device so it doesn’t go ahead and check leak your IP anyways, which also restricts choice of devices you use. Cause remember, if any device on your network ever connects to the net without the VPN, then your anonymity just went out the window.
No one thinks VPNs are “magic bullets”. I don’t know why this gets repeated ad nauseum.
True but it’s not that bad.
Just choose a good provider. You don’t need to configure anything.
That’s what kill switches are for.
Ooh, I know why! It’s because YouTubers hawk their preferred (sponsored) VPN as if it was silver bullet and that it’s dangerous to use your mobile device out in public or worse – public WiFi – without it. You can’t blame John or Jane Doe from parroting what their favourite YouTuber claimed.
I agree it’s a powerful tool! I was specifically responding to “problem solved” in the previous comment. My reply was in no way meant as a general review of VPNs.
This problem solved, but whenever you change your network or IP and then periodically, your phone will report to Firebase, so you can receive push notifications.
You can block those with software that simulates a local VPN with a filter, but you won’t get any more push notifications. Now push notifications are not just the ones you see. Some apps use invisible ones to get infos they need to work.
True, it’s storing the IP address that is the issue.
Which they actually acknowledge in the blog post.
Kind of interesting that they’re smart enough to understand how to sniff packets but not enough to understand that IP address = location.
Author noted:
And this was with location services off. How precise is a “postal index” in the author’s country (presumably Spain) I wonder.