Edit: Below is my original post, will not edit original in an attempt to be transparent as it provides context to those comments. Several good comments outlining what could be going on were posted as well. Seems the list of “know to track” from that service (Google) is very different from what was actually requested by this specific app. 36 attempts so far were made, but DDG does not specify of what type.
Original: So this seems like a pretty intense level of tracking. Certainly much more than any of the other lemmy apps I have tried. I get advertisements, totally fine with them earning money, but it took me by surpise.
If I look at the privacy policy, it certainly does not indicate to me this level of monitoring.
For the record, I am not implying deception on the devs part at all, I am sure things are spelled our correctly in the privacy policy. Just wasn’t sure everone was aware of the extent.
Cheers!
Edit: some people are implying I was trying to mislead with my title. For clarity I am using duckduckgo track blocker “App Tracking Protection” and it states “Tracking Attempts” https://ibb.co/DzWMFMy
The list on the original post is what data is being attempted to pull and the protection stopped as far as i can tell.
Edit 2: updated title to be more clear. Wasn’t aware I could even do that!
Cheers mate The track blocker says “attempts” pretty clearly I wasn’t trying to mislead
This seems completely over-the-top when the person is literally trying to have a discussion about something that they have admitted to not knowing much about. “Attempts” is the terminology being used by the DDG app, which explains why OP is using the same wording.
This whole thread has a weird, defensive and “reinforce my purchase” type of vibe. LJDawson has been pretty transparent about this and has worked hard on the app, so I sorta get it, but come on.
“In fact, misleading is putting it lightly.”
How about we all calm down before starting to throw personal accusations out there?
Thank you for spelling it out so clearly. I’ve seen the screenshot from DDG a few times today but I didn’t know how the underlying mechanics of it worked. Now I even notice at the top it says “known to collect:”.
It’s still misleading. It doesn’t say what information was attempted to be gathered those 28 times. It may very well have been 28 attempts to collect the same exact “Device orientation” over and over again (and it most likely is something simple like that).
Are you able to see what domains were blocked? Other posters have suggested that these attempts are blocked by DNS. If we could see the domains that were queried, we could have a better understanding of what’s being attempted here.
My speculation would be that we would see google owned domains, but I don’t know
Are those exactly what it’s tracking or what it’s “known” to track?
Former? Bad
Latter? This post is misrepresenting at best and downright malicious at worst.
Hello! Promise no malice intended.
I was just playing around with the app and noticed duckduck go blocking a ton of new tracking attempts.
I can only go by what was stated in the app as “attempts” hence my post.
Someone who understand how duckduckgos tracking blocker work might know better however. Perhaps you are 100% right.
I read this as “Google attempted to track you 28 times. We don’t know specifically what they were after, but Google is known (who is doing the knowing I don’t know) to track the following information.” So basically it’s saying Google was definitely trying to get your info, and here’s a list of what they might have been after. But it’s not proof of what was actually tracked.
Each of those is for a valid feature of the app, and you can disable those you don’t like.
This entire post is a thinly veiled scare tactic. “well I’m not saying it’s a problem, but look what they’re doing!! I’m just asking questions here” kind of bullshit
Seems more like you’re projecting a reality that isn’t the case. Moreso projecting a weird defensive attitude over a social media application when people are, understandably, concerned about their data privacy. I think we should keep this type of attitude over on the Reddit side.
With the little information given here, it looks like that’s the information Google is known to track. Which is definitely not new information. Nor is it surprising that an Android app using ads would serve Google ads.
Says "36 tracking attempts blocked "… So perhaps poor wording on duckduckgos part?
I would totally believe that it blocked that many attempts at IP connections or even potentially grabbing device info. Idk what the duckduckgo product can intercept and reports here. But the UI definitely seems to decouple “we blocked X attempts” from the types of tracking Google is known to do.
My suspicion is that in apps that e.g. include Google and Facebook you’d see both listed with N attempts and similar “here’s what Facebook is known to collect.”
“Known to collect” is going to be vastly different from what’s actually being collected. It’s more realistically just serving ads, getting some crash/error reporting. But because it’s all under Google, it’s going to show up as Google. DDG/other blockers won’t know the difference.
You do know you can edit titles, right?
You can change it to reflect the reality of what’s going on. You can edit the body in the post further, to reflect what you’ve learned since posting.
Here’s the URL to the dev’s privacy policy as listed on the Play Store. It should give a better idea of what he actually does: https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/28463889
