← Back to context

Comment by strcat

6 months ago

The approach used by /e/ doesn't actually work and enables fingerprinting VPN users. It only stops the least invasive tracking for client side analytics, etc. where there are single purpose domains which can be blocked. Multi-purpose domains used for both privacy invasive things and functionality don't get blocked. The app's own servers used for the most privacy invasive behaviors in practice of course don't get blocked. They can share whatever they want with arbitrary third parties through those. However, it won't get blocked client side by /e/ if it's needed for any functionality so third party services which are privacy invasive won't be blocked unless the app doesn't need them, doesn't do it server side and doesn't do basic evasion of filtering deployed in many apps by resolving DNS queries themselves or having IP fallbacks like Facebook.

Location Scopes is a planned replacement for the standard Android Mock Location feature which is rebranded in /e/ as their own feature. /e/ does not have features similar to Contact Scopes or Storage Scopes. It doesn't provide the current generation standard Android privacy protections or patches since it's always very far behind on updates. Most privacy patches aren't backported to older releases, but they lag far behind on backports and don't fully apply them despite claiming to provide a much newer patch level than they do.