I was planning to wait and see what Boost has to offer before deciding if I should pay $20 to remove ads on Sync, but seeing this has convinced me to delete the app for good. Even Reddit isn’t half as bad as Sync when it comes to trackers and shady ads.
It’s not the app. It’s links you’re visiting from within it.
That’s not how DDG’s app tracking protection works. It doesn’t trigger on websites. It’s not the links. It’s the ad service in the app. That’s why when you pay, the attempts stop. The dev himself said that the ad library doesn’t load when you’ve paid to remove ads (beyond doing an initial check to see if you’ve paid). Since paying stops the trackers in Sync’s ad library from loading, it no longer makes attempts and you won’t see it on this screen in DDG. If it really was the website, you’d still see it AND other Lemmy apps would show up here too, but they don’t.
That’s a very good point. Did you click any links?
You see a lot of links to Microsoft and google pages on the fediverse? I’m literally not sure I’ve ever seen one. Also isn’t the D double click?
Yes? Almost every page on the Internet has a sign in with Google/FB/Apple button or some other big companies API involved.
What are y’all getting linked to from here?
Just about any and every news site has a sign in that you can use Facebook or Gmail to log in, probably AppleID, but I don’t use Apple products so I’ve never noticed, as well as creating a site specific account to log in.
ETA: Look at the pic, it’s saying
GmailGoogle pulled data from within eBay.Sure but if you’re not signing in to each and every site, which, like, nobody does on this site I’ll tell you that much, does it still track you? Wouldn’t be surprised either way
It doesn’t matter.
Those little login buttons make a call to their host (google/fb/etc), and that is what shows up in these shitty tracking apps, even if you don’t press them.
Using a Google fonts font? That’s a call to Google.
This is the norm on the Internet. You’d be hard pressed to find a site that doesn’t send some data to somewhere else for some service.
If I click a link in Sync, and I have an account for that site, I log in for my view preferences, and to save something to read later.
You also don’t need to log in for a site to track who’s visiting it. It’s like website 101 now, that every site tracks how anyone interacts with it.
I just opened sync after installing Duck Duck Go. From within sync, Google requested 33 pieces of data. Google. Not sync. Google requested the data from within Sync. I’m fairly certain the only link to Sync that Google has, is the app store.
The ads that sync serves aren’t google?
The great lengths people will go to just marginally improve their user experience. Just use a FOSS app that’s 99% of what Sync is but doesn’t have this BS
Or just use the web front end, which really does it all anyway.
we seriously need some kind of disclaimer for what duck duck go is doing on y’all’s phones. i don’t even use the app and i’ve seen a dozen posts exactly like this.
TLDR: ddg includes data from ANY website you visit from within the app’s built-in browser in its results. since basically every modern website is also a privacy nightmare, this will show up in ddg’s statistics
I find these sort of apps are so alarmist.
This is the problem with ads. That’s where this is coming from. Reddit serves it’s ads differently, so you don’t see the same glut of attempts.
Anything using admob throws up a shit ton of stuff like this.
Now, whether you choose to pay to remove them, or abandon the app is up to you (though I guess ad blockers are another option). But it isn’t sync directly doing this, it’s ads and sites you go to within the app.
Ddg really needs to add some granularity to how they label this stuff. It’s misleading
But it isn’t sync directly doing this, it’s ads and sites you go to within the app.
It is though, since the Sync dev is the one that added the ads in.
Look, you can play around with the wording all you want, but there is a difference between an app having trackers and an ad service having trackers. Since blocking the ads blocks the trackers, and paying to stop the ads blocks the trackers, the difference is obvious since that’s the source of them, and the only source of them.
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The dev of sync put ads in his app…….he even specifically says that unless you pay to remove the ads you will be “tracked”.
Oh boy.This will trigger some users 😁
The nuke is armed
What are you using to track each request like this?
I think it’s duckduckgo
it looks like the duckduckgo app
These were the only (tracking) connections sync made in the past hour.
For the past 24 hours for 2k requests, it apparently made 64 requests for ads and 6 requests for trackers.
I’m not saying you are wrong or anything, but the stats may be more nuanced than you think so.
Eh, I guess the results depend a lot on situational things. I only get a fraction of those trackers for Sync for example, and only from Google.
That’s a lot of data flying about.
Get ready for the “let people enjoy things” brigade.
What are the actual urls? A lot of this stuff is often completely harmless, especially google… on an android phone
what app is this
DuckDuckGo app, it’s got a feature to block trackers across your phone. It isn’t a VPN but you turn it on as such. I use AdGuard’s DNS in my phone settings to block ads and trackers instead. Paste this link in your custom DNS field
Adguard DNS Is pretty damn great, I was amazed when I used a friend’s phone and realized Viber had ads!
How do I use this without disabling my firewall app? (NetGuard) I get an error saying that Android will only let me use one VPN at a time.
I’m not getting rid of NetGuard unless DDG can block apps from accessing the internet completely by default, like NG does (including system apps cause they spy on you too).
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I have no idea what this means, but I will google it. Thank you.
