Comment by adeon
5 months ago
If you have the equipment (e.g. a spare Linux computer and WiFi router) and know-how, you can set up something like mitmproxy (looks very similar feature set to the Android App, but likely requires more effort to set up) to your home network. That's what I did some weeks ago, and then basically the same exercise you did (just my whole network instead of just phone), looking what's going on. And yeah...it's not good.
Even if I trust some companies to be trustworthy, I can't possibly vet a gazillion entities getting telemetry requests, and not all of them can have their shit together, security, privacy or ethics-wise.
It made me ditch some Microsoft software, but overall escaping spying feels like a lost battle, unless you go do spartan Richard Stallman-like computing (IIRC he had pretty hardcore stance over the software he'll use).
Well I believe it's Feasible.
Anyway like most things it's a journey, not an on off switch. First you get aware then you make change and the situation gets better, it doesn't have to be perfect to be better.
On my Android phone, I had to make clear cut on which app I could keep after seeing the logs. The apps from Google, microsoft, amazon they are all gone. Even the play services and the play store replaced with aurora.
It cuts at least 2/3 of the network requests.
Then you have the case of individual apps that use Facebook SDK or other advertiser, there are often alternatives in the open source community and when it's not the case there are always less privacy invasive alternative on the store.
For instance, my default Samsung weather app was sending lots and lots of data. The alternative on the froid were not in my taste.
I eventually found out about weawow, it's not open source but it doesn't require any weird permission, no ads, it's not constantly sending data in the background and my logs says it only connect to weather.weawow.com.
I mean it's fine.
After spending weeks with the firewall, i was able to identify the spying app and replace most of them. My network log now is pretty empty when I'm not using the phone.