After the discussion in the following post I dug a bit deeper the rabbit hole.

While I mostly relied on Exodus to see if an app has trackers in it… I was baffle to see all the sketchy requests it made while dumping the DNS requests with PCAPdroid…

Over 200 shady requests in a few seconds after login… here’s a preview:

While I don’t use AdguardVPN, I have Adguard Home as my DNS server in my homelab… I think It’s time to switch to pi-hole !

Edit: VPN pcapdroid

  • Fontasia@feddit.nl
    1·
    6 months ago

    A lot of paranoia on this community :(

    There’s a few sign in checks (The variety makes me think Disqus or something similar.), a couple of keep alives, your phone registering for Wi-Fi calling, Fallback DNS requests, a couple of CDN requests which I would get is likely update checks and finally YouTube content for NewPipe. I think I’m seeing five tracking cookies based on the rest of your apps here, probably being sent “Do Not Track” requests.

  • LWD@lemm.ee
    0·
    6 months ago

    I really wish I knew WTF was going on here. I don’t use iOS, but from what I’ve heard, there are approximately two ways to enable decent content blocking on it and AdGuard has always been recommended as one of them.

    If they’re stealing data intentionally, this seems like the dumbest way to go about it. And if it’s not intentional, what a mess. And if you’re somehow getting inaccurate data… How?

    • N0x0n@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      6 months ago

      And if you’re somehow getting inaccurate data… How?

      I’m not sure how I could get inaccurate data. I have a rooted android and de-bloated to a maximum. PCAPdroid only works without a VPN connection… And those requests appear when I open the AdguardVPN app.

      Other apps like Firefox doesn’t send that much DNS requests just the usual ingest.sentry.io.

      Edit: I have added other screenshots