I set up a Raspberry Pi 3 with AdguardHome for a friend of mine, and told him to disconnect everything at home and try to watch anything on his phone, being the only device using his home’s internet.
He just sent me this, and now he’s ready to #degoogle 🤣🤣🤣
He says there were hundreds in less than 5 minutes.
Ohhhh no, his phone checked to see if it was connected to the Internet! The horrors!
If you’re OK with that, good for you. I certainly dont want any of my devices hitting any server I didn’t explicitly approve of, especially not 100s of times in a few minutes. To each his own. You evidently don’t know what that means, enjoy.
It’s only happening that many times because you are blocking it, so it thinks it is disconnected and is checking to see if it managed to reconnect.
Then you can’t really browse the web lol. You will never have that much control.
Better to anonymize the traffic as much as possible
I can browse just fine, and I have plenty of sites and addresses blocked (4 million + last I checked). Yes, some sites and functionalities do break, but that’s the trade off, and we each have to decide what we want to live with and what we can live without. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you, and vice versa.
Work I agree with you. The point I’m trying to make is just asking for Google.com for example, could give you a different server between two requests.
You can control domains, but you cannot control servers, you can only trust that a domain doesn’t resolve to something malicious.
That’s one of the biggest issues. A domain that points somewhere right now could point to an entirely different server later, and we have no way of knowing until its too late. But we have become too dependent on this hyper-conectivity to easily move away from this. Its a challenge, for sure, but I enjoy the fight against these companies and the trolls they insert everywhere. Apparently this is the new way to have fun for me 🤪
I agree it’s definitely fun to see how far we can push it as consumers.
Long term. I do think the more sustainable solution is for people to run their own “Personal Clouds”.
It’s the 2nd “PC” revolution 🙂
I’ve been degoogled for so long that I can’t imagine ever going back to anything other than self-hosting. Sure, starting is not easy, buy once I got used to it, I could not be happier.
To each his own, sure, but for most people that includes push notifications, and that’s how they work.
There are plenty of ways to get push notifications. Maybe they are not as convenient as letting Google do everything for you in exchange of your privacy, but certainly doable. Ironically enough, just google how to do it and you’ll find a few ways, lol.
If you did that though, wouldn’t you get pretty similar activity to what you’ve posted here? Just to servers other than Google’s
I’m not meaning to be contrarian to your point about this being a reason why you should de-google, just absent of context someone reading this post might be compelled to do so without understanding that is going to compromise functions of their device they’re likely accustomed to
You make a good point. I will try to start commenting and posting with more context moving forward. The fact remains that, as long as we’re using addresses not controlled by us (namely not self-hosted) we need to decide how much we trust any address and server we interact with. Maybe because of Google’s size and noise, I am completely against them, the same as I’m against Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Amazon and a whole suite of others.
Agreed! Personally, my willingness to trust a service is generally a function of the utility I get from the service. My data has value, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it priceless!
What does it mean?
I think it means op didn’t want replies out of their bubble and took that comment personally, hence ‘to each his own’
Or they’re a smug prick
I, too, would like to know what it means
What it means is that your devices and browsers are constantly pinging Google under the guise of “serving static content to speed up connection”. This is where each of us needs to determine what makes sense and what doesn’t. If I’m hitting sites not owned by Google, why does Google have to know about it? And even if they “need to know”, which they dont, why do you have to check so many times in a row in such short periods of time? Its all about knowing what you’re doing at all times, which comes with the added stress of them using up your data if limited, and slowing down your connection, however slightly it may be. Therefore, to each his own. I dont like that, so I block it. You dont mind? Fine, have at it, that’s your right. What I will certainly keep doing is trying to steer people away from just letting Big Tech do whatever they want, and that’s done by informing what these companies do, how and how often. Some people will care, and maybe even do something about it, others won’t and maybe even try to convince others that there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, to each his own.
Looking at how often requests happen is a red herring though. Your phone could be collecting data on you for a week and then send a single request with all of it. But I see lots people going “look how many requests” as if it was indicating anything. It’s bad that the requests are happening in the first place, but it doesn’t mean much that there are 10 requests at once or 1 request per hour.
In fact most analytics SDKs for mobile apps cache the events locally and send them in batches at some larger interval of time. And these single rarer requests are much more damaging to your privacy then lots of connectivity checks that don’t actually send any significant data.
That actually makes sense. Not that I’m happy with the constant phoning home of these a-holes, but it stands to reason that they would do that instead its way less conspicuous, so would be harder to point out as a trend.