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Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

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Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#61

Post by 101404 »

TylerE wrote: post #30
rubyn00bie wrote: post #20

This is literally, one among many reasons (ha!), why I use Firefox. Every other browser vendor is a for-profit entity, and as such will limit good ad-blocking measures as Safari and Chrome have done recently with their new "security" policies. This is also why I don't use a VPN I don't run (or certainly not one that hasn't been audited with a good reputation), and I certainly would never fucking dream of using a free…

Mozilla is a for profit entity with some history of selling out their users (Remember Pocket). The Mozilla foundation is a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

What happened with Pocket?

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#62

Post by jsjddbbwj »

TylerE wrote: post #30
rubyn00bie wrote: post #20

This is literally, one among many reasons (ha!), why I use Firefox. Every other browser vendor is a for-profit entity, and as such will limit good ad-blocking measures as Safari and Chrome have done recently with their new "security" policies. This is also why I don't use a VPN I don't run (or certainly not one that hasn't been audited with a good reputation), and I certainly would never fucking dream of using a free…

Mozilla is a for profit entity with some history of selling out their users (Remember Pocket). The Mozilla foundation is a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

They have some history of selling out their users... by literally selling their history: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#63

Post by jsjddbbwj »

283627283637 wrote: post #44
rubyn00bie wrote: post #20

This is literally, one among many reasons (ha!), why I use Firefox. Every other browser vendor is a for-profit entity, and as such will limit good ad-blocking measures as Safari and Chrome have done recently with their new "security" policies. This is also why I don't use a VPN I don't run (or certainly not one that hasn't been audited with a good reputation), and I certainly would never fucking dream of using a free…

Firefox is like that really ugly flower that blooms once every hundred years, they leapfrog the competition briefly and then eventually degrade back to being crap for regular users. I'm aware of the technical politics around what causes this but that only really matters for people who choose browsers based on cyber politics. Quantum was good for six months, now we're back to the same situation where almost everyone o…

>Firefox is like that really ugly flower that blooms once every hundred years, they leapfrog the competition briefly and then eventually degrade back to being crap for regular users.

Firefox is the AMD of browsers.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#64

Post by jsjddbbwj »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #3

Proprietary ad blockers cannot be trusted. It is better to use something like AdAway and Firefox with uBlock Origin.

And what's good for iOS? I've tried Firefox Focus, but you can't customise what lists it uses, and the lists it comes with are not that good.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#65

Post by Krasnol »

risyachka wrote: post #60
Krasnol wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the huge difference of knowing that you give away your data and not knowing? There is nothing "fair" about it and just the fact that they are now gone from the stores should...I don't know...maybe make you think about that a bit? PS: just because there are worse situations, doesn't make this a good one.

I meant general practice done legally, e.g. stating this in their policy and showing when you run the app for the first time that it will sell their not personal data in exchange for free service. The concept is fair as some are willing to pay with money, some are ok to pay with their data. Hiding the fact that you will sell data obviously deserves the punishment.

And that's the big deal here.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#66

Post by Dylan16807 »

lonelappde wrote: post #47
Dylan16807 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> oxylabs (NordVPN), luminati (Holla) Wow that's misleading. Oxylabs and Luminati are both residential proxy networks. Hola is a VPN that sells access to Luminati. NordVPN is a VPN that does not sell access to anyone. It is not sending anyone else's data through your connection. There's an accusation that it shares ownership with Oxylabs, and that's about it. NordVPN might be buying , not selling, residential proxy a…

Oh Nord's not bad because pay other people to break into other people's computers but but respect their own customers' privacy? https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...

Assuming they do so, the comment I replied to is still extremely misleading.

But do you have any actual evidence they do so? Having some IPs that show up as residential isn't good enough.

That article doesn't call out any specific VPNs.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#67

Post by AznHisoka »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #53

Haha, I quietly called them out few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17823292 Their CEO is one shady dude. Evasive. Knew his company was sitting on a shady foundation and just kept it going. Large companies buy Sensor Tower's data.

SimilarWeb is another company with millions of funding that is sitting on a shady foundation as well.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#68

Post by Angostura »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #20

This is literally, one among many reasons (ha!), why I use Firefox. Every other browser vendor is a for-profit entity, and as such will limit good ad-blocking measures as Safari and Chrome have done recently with their new "security" policies. This is also why I don't use a VPN I don't run (or certainly not one that hasn't been audited with a good reputation), and I certainly would never fucking dream of using a free…

> Every other browser vendor is a for-profit entity, and as such will limit good ad-blocking measures as Safari

I thought Safari introduced support for Content Blockers specifically to avoid ad blockers from phoning home and passing potentially sensitive information to the ad blocker's writer.

Lots of people then got quite cross that their favourite blocker had been blocked.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#69

Post by dmos62 »

jsjddbbwj wrote: post #62
TylerE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is a for profit entity with some history of selling out their users (Remember Pocket). The Mozilla foundation is a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

They have some history of selling out their users... by literally selling their history: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

This was an experiment (2017), not sure what became of it.

> Less than one percent of users in Germany installing Firefox from our main download page will receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz recommendations enabled out of the box.

> This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit. Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox. Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.

Re: Sensor Tower owns ad blocker and VPN apps that collect user data

#70

Post by 01CGAT »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #66
lonelappde wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh Nord's not bad because pay other people to break into other people's computers but but respect their own customers' privacy? https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...

Assuming they do so, the comment I replied to is still extremely misleading. But do you have any actual evidence they do so? Having some IPs that show up as residential isn't good enough. That article doesn't call out any specific VPNs.

A snippet from the article on the residential IP's:

"Furthermore, we conducted realtime device fingerprinting when we captured each IP address. And we have successfully identified the device type and vendor information for 547,497 IP addresses. What surprised us is that 237,029 of them turned out to be IoT systems, such as web camera, DVR, and printer."

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