Yes wifi and Bluetooth are used to track your location. That's why Android requires you to grant location permissions to apps that want to access them.
In other words, if they have this information, it's because you explicitly gave them permission to collect it. Don't do that.
My favorite is when “data not tied to your id” is user ID, name, device ID…
This is probably why even though phones have gotten faster, they still seem slow.
It’s also hilarious to me how little battery voyager uses compared to most modern apps.
In unrelated news. Alway use a Pihole for your network and a DNS sink (e.g. 1Blocker) on your devices. What would you use on Android for that?
I mean, there are two problems here.
The first problem is solving this for the kind of people who are going to set up the above on their networks.
The other is solving it for the general public, which I would suggest is harder.
I've never tried Pihole but maybe I'll try to set it up. What happens when ads try to play when it's enabled? Are they just blank? Or if someone is watching a streaming service and an ad tries to come up what happens?
Also what happens if the device running Pihole goes down, as in if I have it running from an old device and it loses connection or restarts. Does everything just stop resolving names until it's back up? (I assume that's what happens like normal dns servers, but I'm trying to think of a device I have that won't be shut off, my media server has a lot going on with it at the moment, and is far from my router, I should move it)
Been running an AWS Lightsail instance for years, and before that on prem. Don't even notice it's running! But when I see other people's internet experience I'm left thinking, "What's all this crap?!"
Ex-wife was bitching about my "blueberry pie" or whatever fucking up FaceBook links. FINE. Turned it off. "The internet's slow!" Looked over her shoulder:
"See all that stuff loading? Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad..."
"FINE! Turn it back on!"
Haven't logged into my instance for a year or more, no maintenance. Going to move it back to a Raspberry Pi or a VM when I get motivated. On Windows 11 now and M$ totally hosed Hyper-V for desktop operating systems and I don't want to spin another computer.
tl;dr: WELL worth spending an evening on the project. Hardest part is spinning up a Debian or Ubuntu server, VM or bare metal. The install is hilariously simple.
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net/ | bash
Comically enough I didn't think about it long, I actually had it up and running on my jellyfin server by 11 this morning. Haven't played with it much yet just set my router DNS to it.
So now it's my jellyfin/Files/Caddy/DNS server. It's an old HP laptop my spouse has that I just hard wired and remote into using RustDesk. Works great even though the network cards arent great, and most of the storage is just an external USB drive.
Does pihole help with this sort of tracking? I've never bothered setting it up because I thought it was just for adblocking and I already use ublock, but if it has other uses I might look into it
Rethink/Adguard/pihole all interfere with the DNS lookup. Depending on the quality of your blocklist, the servers they try to send the data too will simply not be reachable.
Laughs in f-droid
Using Duckduckgo App Tracking Protection. I'm not very knowledgeable about it but it shows me what it's blocking and it seems like at least a first step towards privacy without much compromises on Android.
Wifi and Bluetooth must be kept off unless in use.
If you are home on wifi, put your cell into air plane mode.
Don't run shady apps.
TC app shows you what trackers each app has. Rmeove shit you don't need, use browser
I have a Continuous Glucose Monitor that communicates with my phon3, so I sadly need to always have Bluetooth on.
unless in use.
It communicates constantly with my phone so I always know my blood sugar. I can see a graph of the last 24 hours in 5-minute increments.
I get that and it should be on. If it can be off, that can reduce tracking
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
