Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

I paid for pcapdroid, it's a network monitoring app that use the vpn protocol on Android to monitor every packet sent, register which app made the request, to whom, dates and so on.

In it's paid feature, you can select app to block internet connection or you can select country, ip and host.

After browsing my internet logs, it shocked me to see some app I had absolutely no idea were spying so much.

Xiaomi home ? Yeah I knew Xiaomi app would be spyware. But Spotify for instance, how could I guess it sends every few hours data to remote server including Facebook ones.

Until I find replacement for Spotify, but most music streaming app do spy on its user (and I don't mean just learning what music you like), I can still block all the graph.facebook.com tracking.eu.miui.com Google ads.gdoubleclick.net and so on.

It's open source but firewall is paid feature, i highly recommend it if you're on Android.

https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/com.emanuelef.remote_capture...

There is even the possibility to decrypt packet and analyze them although it require root, i did it on another phone and yeah it's similar to what the author found. Every single bit of data, ip adress, since how long the phone is on, the wifi connections, when did I unlock the phone and so on.

Every data taken individually is not important to me but this stream of little data constantly going God knows where is creepy as fuck.

If you have the equipment (e.g. a spare Linux computer and WiFi router) and know-how, you can set up something like mitmproxy (looks very similar feature set to the Android App, but likely requires more effort to set up) to your home network. That's what I did some weeks ago, and then basically the same exercise you did (just my whole network instead of just phone), looking what's going on. And yeah...it's not good.

Even if I trust some companies to be trustworthy, I can't possibly vet a gazillion entities getting telemetry requests, and not all of them can have their shit together, security, privacy or ethics-wise.

It made me ditch some Microsoft software, but overall escaping spying feels like a lost battle, unless you go do spartan Richard Stallman-like computing (IIRC he had pretty hardcore stance over the software he'll use).