How in the world can this be considered reasonable for them to track you across other apps and sites? This like if the local grocery store owner would install hidden cameras to spy on me at home and at work and in the car and one day somebody forced them to ask if I'm sure that's what I want them to do.
This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an iPhone...
...and then, when finally prevented from doing so, they issued a quavery-voiced lament about how not being able to secretly film people without their consent will "hurt my ability to run my camsite efficiently and effectively."
>This like if the local grocery store owner would install hidden cameras to spy on me at home and at work
The more accurate analogy would be the grocery store owner teaming up with other local businesses to aggregate your shopping habits across stores into a central database. What you're describing would be if facebook installed a RAT on your computer after visiting it.
I'm not sure that always is really voluntary. Perhaps they don't have much choice. I don't know how can Facebook force them but e.g. with Google you have to use Google Analytics to score good in the search results AFAIK.
Any app that uses Facebook SDK, of which there are thousands. Zoom only removed it in March 2020, after it was raised as a privacy issue. they are a massive, publicly traded company, and they were fine with keeping it in their codebase, until enough people complained.
Anyone who advertises with FB sticks the FB pixel SDK in their app to track conversions and performance of their FB ad spend. This pixel tracks a lot and reports back to FB.
Can you actually use PiHole to serve DNS for your Android? I was able to direct my Linux systems to my PiHole but my Android phone seemed to not care a wit about my internal DNS.
Yes, absolutely. A few apps (notably chrome) use secure dns by default, and given the state of that ecosystem they default to their own provider. You'll need to set up secure dns on your pihole and tell chrome to use that provider (or disable it in chrome).
If I'm understanding their desired goal correctly they'd like to get that kind of DNS-level blocking everywhere, not just on their home wifi. I know I appreciate having those nuisances blocked remotely -- some apps don't even run with poor cell service for me without DNS-level blocking because of all the extra data they're trying to transfer.
I've solved this problem by hosting a VPN server behind the network-wide PiHole DNS, and I have my Android phone connected to the VPN whilst on mobile data.
(I haven't yet worked out how to automate connection to VPN once out of range of my home wi-fi, or disconnection when in range, but doing it manually isn't much hassle).
I also have a cloud-hosted PiHole instance (planned as a service to friends and family), but that's still a work in progress that I'd actually semi-forgotten about...
I setup a Pi-hole yesterday with two Android phones (manually setting the DNS on each device at the moment until I'm sure there are no issues and I want to set it at the router level for all devices on the network). Both phones worked as expected. One is a Pixel 4a with Chrome as the browser and I didn't experience any issues or have to do anything special during setup.
Yep go delete your WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram accounts now. Takes 10 minutes. No one truly needs them. Don't make excuses why you need them. In fact these apps only hurt you. So don't hesitate, just do it. It can feel uneasy, but in only a week or so you'll be happy you pulled through.
Too bad it takes 1 month for any of those services to permanently delete your account -- logging in up to a month after clicking the "delete" button, even accidentally, fully restores the account and you have to go through the entire process again.
Need more incentive? Just try finding the delete button on your Facebook or Instagram account. Go ahead, just look for it right now.
You weren't able to find it, right? Just "disable"? That's because you can only delete either account through the delete account page, which you can only navigate to via... a link. Nowhere in the UI leads to this. And the Instagram one clearly hasn't been maintained since 2007 or so.
Haven't deleted your account yet? Just think for a minute about why you maintain an account with a company that respects your autonomy so little that they make you jump through multiple obnoxious hoops just to delete your account. And make you wait a full month, just in case you aren't 100% sure. Because they're your friend.
Yes, luckily I was able to find the delete button :) WhatsApp was instant, only FB & Instagram took 30 days. But that's not a reason to not delete the accounts, isn't it? Just hit the button, remove the apps, and forget about it, a month later the accounts will be gone.
This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an iPhone...