Give permission. Don't give permission. They know where you are anyway

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Is that tinfoil hat comfortable?

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None worth pursuing

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Easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Most companies are so big, getting caught is relatively cheap with how low the fines are compared to their annual profits.

It's just a line item on their expense sheets, anymore, and most people don't have the money to get the justice they deserve in court.

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You'd want to be using only Linux apps that weren't recording and reporting everything. Much easier to get in Linux than Apple/android

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Latitude and Longitude are in there. As is screen brightness. He does acknowledge that he is on Wi-Fi, but that’s still super suspicious

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This we can expect but there’s also a trend to idolise solo developers or small firms but everyone can be shitty and everyone should be accountable. In this case a smaller developer steals user data do defrauds Unity most likely because they think they’re too small to be worth investigating.

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Use a custom DNS and/or hosts file. You can cut them off the grid by blocking data upload to SSP. Don't install many apps, for games that can be played offline, play them offline.

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It may have estimated location data with IP from Wi-Fi. Location Services turns on GPS but that is not the only way of getting location.

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But when Firebase gets that network/IP change report, what information does it get? Because if it only gets the public IP address, the reported IP will still be the VPN one, not the real one, right? So, if that were the only information reported to Firebase, wouldn't you still be protected? Does Firebase block requests when you're using a VPN (this could be detected, for example, if certain aspects of the network have changed but the IP hasn't)? Is that what you mean with not getting push notifications when simulating a local IP with filters?

PS: From my research, the WiFi's SSID can also be used to track someone's whereabouts, but depending on where you are and how many networks have used the same SSID, it may work work well or badly. You can see that by going to https://wigle.net/ (which is a database on WiFi networks with some publicly-available information), go to the map, type in the SSID field, and click "Filter".

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Using a VPN means that all your traffic is routed through a possibly malicious actor.

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Like Kevin Spacey?

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Google hardcodes DNS into their hardware appliances...
So you'd need to block outgoing DNS requests except for your DNS server and god forbid you change location with a smartphone.

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I think this is about apps and not the operating system. But yeah, the stock ROMs also phone home to Google. You'd need to patch that. For example like custom ROMs like GrapheneOS do. I don't see another viable alternative. But that still leaves you with the issues with the apps mentioned in the article.

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It gets your unique tracking ID, so it knows you're the same person now with different IP. If you use apps that store location data in firebase (eg. find my device, fitness trackers, emergency alert apps) it will upload your GPS location and maybe nearby wifi names, if you set it to be extra precise.

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Surprising that this data never heard gets leaked. It's always my social security number

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That's gold, Jerry!

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Author noted:

As a quick note - location shared was not very precise (but still in the same postal index), I guess due to the fact that iPhone was connected to WiFi and had no SIM installed.
If it was LTE, I bet the lat/lon would be much more precise.

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No one thinks VPNs are “magic bullets”. I don’t know why this gets repeated ad nauseum.

Ooh, I know why! It's because YouTubers hawk their preferred (sponsored) VPN as if it was silver bullet and that it's dangerous to use your mobile device out in public or worse – public WiFi – without it. You can't blame John or Jane Doe from parroting what their favourite YouTuber claimed.

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You know the towers log data too, right? And that websites themselves can track you regardless of what OS you use, right?

Privacy is good, but stop with this "Linux is a magic weapon" BS.

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That’s crazy. As it’s (almost) impossible to prevent those data to be sent from the phone, would it be possible to make the data useless ? For instance by sending loads of fake json payloads for some ids ? Then enjoy my data which says at the same time that I’m in Vancouver, Lisbon, Paris, on my low cost and super expensive phone, with volume at max and zero,…
Not possible I guess ?

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Give permission. Don't give permission. They know where you are anyway