view the rest of the comments
Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
If you are concerned about analytics and tracking then I have bad news for you. Most apps on the Play Store are absolutely loaded with inbuilt trackers. You can check them using Exodus (or use the Aurora Store since privacy reports are displayed by default there).
Thank you for that site. Very useful.
I haven't seen that feature on the aurora store, but I probably just missed it.
I expect free apps to have tracking, but if it's something like an app launcher that needs so many permissions and is running all the time... That's just horrific
It's towards the bottom of the page for whatever app you're viewing. Sometimes it won't have a privacy report available by default, but you can always go through to the website and generate one yourself. One of the worst apps I've found so far is the Woolworths one (Australian supermarket). It contains 11 trackers and within the first 6 hours following installation my tracker blocker had already prevented 11,325 tracking attempts.
As someone who likewise freaked out when I got a pihole setup and 30% or more of requests were blocked, the early days are normally just the same requests endlessly retrying. So while it blocked 11k, if they weren't blocked it would probably only be a few hundred. Probably poor programming not covering the fact it can be blocked.
Still better to block, though.
In a way I think that makes it more scary though, at least in a figurative sense. It's like a group of debt collectors constantly banging on your door to get in and you have your foot there and are telling them to go away but they won't listen. If you take it away for a second, they knock it down and come charging in to take what they believe they are owed.
Yeah, that's pretty much it 😐