On chat, someone posted https://spreadprivacy.com/app-tracking-protection-open-beta/ / https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.duckduckgo.mobile.android.
There is hardly any technical info, so I found it worth summing up:
- It's simply yet another hosts based blacklist.
- It uses the same fake VPN trick everyone else does since years. (i.e. Blokada)
- It does not appear to be open source.
- It's 100% aggressive, borderline lying marketing.
- Its founder is still a professional liar, i.e. marketer.
- The 'better encryption!!1111' is a joke that can only trick complete beginners. When was the last time you logged into a non-TLS'd site? A decade? Two? Every centennial with a computer has been taught to 'watch out for the lock icon', and you'll be hard-pressed to even find a website that is on plain HTTP now. It's so hard, someone made neverssl.com just for those test cases where you'd need one. You can also use http://ip.chip.icu, which deliberately allows HTTP for easy use on CLI. (Other CHIP sites redirect automatically.) Or, if you need it specifically for captive portals,
captive.chip.icu works for all common OS variations incl. Microsoft's. (They're not all using Google's method.)
Really just another marketing product to exploit modern dystopia without actually doing squat. Teach non-techies, so they avoid getting a false sense of privacy. It's just yet another capitalist niche product, nothing more.
Any hype or trend will be monetized.
DNS based blacklists are also rather useless. I do use them myself to get rid of annoyances, and stop some of the lazier offenders. But you have to be aware that it's trivial to circumvent. There are dozens of corpos dedicated to circumvention, making it as easy as a 5-min fix.
On that note, @karan was right, holy cow, Blokada turned corporate big time. Any fool can do what they do. In fact, this fool right here did it long before them! But I created a simple CLI tool, and not a hyped-up design marketing machinery. It's bizarre how everything revolves around money and ego. I shared my stuff with those who wanted/needed it.
Do not fall for marketers. There is nothing special about any of this. The privacy benefits of such approaches have long been decimated, if they ever even had any in the first place. There are many ways around them, and corpos have billions of dollars to pay codemonkeys to find them. (Which in itself is more capitalist absurdity. It takes a whopping 5 mins of thinking to come up with a few ways…)
