Tracking my phone's silent connections

In my home network I use a hosts file to block unwanted tracking. I use a file from this [1] project, which makes it easy to filter out the type of content you don't want.

The nice thing about this is that it blocks requests from any device in my network, especially from those which cannot be configured with a firewall or adblocker.

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

it's not a proper solution (apps can simply communicate with their servers public ip instead of looking up a domain name.)

To clarify, outside of the CDN providers or AWS calls and the big 3 (Facebook, Google, Apple), the vast majority of the calls seem to be to marketing providers or developer tools

Branch - these guys provide deep links into phones and tools to analyze who clicked on the links and if they worked.

mParticle, Appsflyer, Braze formerly Appboy, Appboy all provide internal app marketing teams tools like mobile push or analytics from the app on the phone.

While NewRelic, letsencrypt (free SSL certificates), crashalytics etc are all developer tools to monitor usage and issues with your app.

In summary majority are 3 classes of traffic: CDNs which cache data, Marketing tools such as deep linking analytics etc, and finally developer tools.

Seems like a missed opportunity for Apple and Google to allow users to opt in or out but send data back to one place and then push that out to all these guys so the phone isn’t sending the same data over and over to so many partners and wasting battery.

Unfortunately, i seriously doubt whether using Android (and thereby supporting Google) will improve your privacy, even when using a firewall.

A simple example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/google-tr...

Apple promotes privacy (which is great), but at the same time they behave like a dictatorship by not providing an opt-out of the iOS walled garden, which they do provide with System Integrity Protection on macOS.

What he is doing will not prevent apps from extracting information and uploading it to their servers. For example, by using an ip address instead of a hostname/domain, an app/service can exclude themselves from the "domain graph" he created with this vpn. Sure you could eventually track down the public ips an app communicates with and block those, but the app will always keep collecting and storing your data, and at some point in time they update their app and change the ip - by the time you notice this your data is already uploaded to the new ip.

The only proper solution is an app firewall for iOS, which is not allowed by Apple. Apple is crippling our freedom with their walled garden/dictatorship, which makes me sad.