Just realized that phone came with a bunch of “hidden” Meta/Facebook services pre-installed and they cannot be uninstalled, so I guess me trying to “fight” WhatsApp is pointless anyway. 🤪
… and then people call me a “luddite”. 🤣🖕
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh geez that sounds like an awful phone 🤣
@prologic@twtxt.net I guess any Android phone is like that, except maybe for the Google Pixel stuff. It’s a shit ecosystem. And so is the iPhone world. It’s all proprietary garbage.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de At least with an iPhone I’m not forced to use anything like Google, Facebook, or TikTok. None of those “things” are ever pre-installed, hidden or otherwise.
@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this whole thing of pre-installed third-party apps doesn’t exist on the iPhone. So that appears to be a bit better. You’re still sharing data with Apple and it’s next to impossible to tell what exactly the device does or does not do (just like with Android). If you can’t easily install your own OS, then it’s a lost cause.
Best you can do with any of these devices is disconnect them from the Internet.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de yeah I’m pretty confident in what my iPhone and other Apple devices (Macbook, Mac Studio, iMacs, etc) do and don’t do in regards to talking back to Apple over the Internet. I mean, I do DNS filtering at my home network and most of the time I ensure my phone is connected to my VPN so that all DNS traverse through my own network and filters,
Obviously I can’t guarantee that it’s not making its own DNS requests and sneaking through my filters, I could go and check at my router level, but I’m fairly confident it probably isn’t.
Last ~24 hours of DNS Requests:
Some of those *.apple.com DNS requests look legit and valid, like itunes (the App Store) and push notifications. Need to investigate what some of the other ones are. There are some Apple domains I already block as well that I’ve figured out over the years.
It also helps a lot to a) ensure you turn off all things “iCloud” when you setup your device and b) teach your wife and children the benefits of doing the same and risks of not ensuring you do a) and c) ensuring that you keep doing a & b 🤣
@prologic@twtxt.net I guess I’m more “strict” than you are, probably. DNS queries tell me very little about which data is actually sent to those servers.
On the other hand, this is probably a reasonable argument: The vast majority of users have no idea what a DNS query even is (and they don’t care to begin with), so trying to hide something here is probably not worth the effort for Google/Apple. This would make filtering DNS requests more meaningful after all.
(But you can’t be sure and that is driving me nuts. I don’t want to deal with this in the first place.)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de A family member gave me their old (pseudo-)smart phone and it had all kinds of pre-installed BS that you’re not supposed to be able to uninstall, Xiaomi, FB, google… you name it. but guess what!? I already know about this Trick and then there is the Rethink DNS/Firewall app I have setup to block all traffic then allow the stuff I need with an Allow, Bypass or Exclude rule.
You’d be surprised to see how much traffic is going to blocked!! 🤣
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com That’s good to know. 🤔 Luckily, the phone wasn’t full of 3rd party stuff. There were so few of them actually, that I didn’t really bother looking. That’s why I only found out recently about that Meta stuff.