forced to buy an echo for new house. any suggestions? (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 months ago by yoshisaur@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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my family is moving into a much bigger house than we used to have. we use amazon echos as an intercom system through the announcement feature. because our house is bigger, i’m being forced to get one myself for my room. i haven’t needed one for years because i use their app on my phone and i can see their announcements as a notification and i can also kill off most of its tracking by DNS. unfortunately my parents don’t understand this and are forcing me to get one. what can i do to limit its tracking?

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[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I specify my LAN DNS servers (2 pihole instances, main + a backup for redundancy) in my routers DHCP settings, so they are the DNS servers handed out to all LAN clients; then I have an iptables rule on the router blocking all port 53 traffic from leaving the network unless it came from those LAN DNS servers. This means only the piholes can reach external dns; everything else is required to use the LAN DNS servers or receive no response. Then the piholes have full control over what can and cannot resolve to an IP.

I haven't found a device that doesn't work with this setup. I used to have a couple google homes before I wised up, they worked fine behind this setup.

[-] miau@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago

Wow thats very interesting. Ill try to so the same on my network

[-] bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/EdzDCkFaskc?si=F8FB0Xn28YeZ9N90

I'm doing this and it works great.

When my server turns off everything stops working which is interesting.

[-] miau@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 3 months ago

Awesome, thanks for the link! Ill get that setup up in my env

this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024

44 points (81.4% liked)

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