this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
2985 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

59575 readers
3418 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Yikes.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Gestrid@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've got an adblocker app running on a local VPN on my phone 24/7 specifically for this reason. I even managed to install the same app on my Fire TV.

[–] corroded@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried something similar for a while. I had an OpenVPN server set up at home and would connect with my phone, so all my phone's traffic was behind the same protections as my home network. The main issue I experienced was when going through areas without cell service (which happens frequently where I live). I would have to restart my VPN client in addition to any apps that required internet connectivity. Not the safest prospect when you're streaming music and doing 70mph down the highway.

At this point, I don't have anything to protect my phone's traffic when I'm away from home. However, essentially every app on my phone is a FOSS package, so I think the biggest risk to data privacy is probably Google.

I've been a happy user ofNextDNS for a couple of years now.

[–] bitbybit@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you share which one? I'd like to clean my phone up a bit.

[–] Gestrid@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm using AdGuard. It does cost me about US$30 a year, but it's worth it to me. In the last week, it's stopped an estimated 192,085 ads and trackers saving me an estimated 2.1 GB of data.

It does occasionally block things that I don't want blocked, but it's easy to fix: you can either temporarily disable protection by tapping the notification in your, well, notifications, or you can use its Assistant feature to quickly find the thing that shouldn't have been blocked in the log and add an exception.