I was planning to wait and see what Boost has to offer before deciding if I should pay $20 to remove ads on Sync, but seeing this has convinced me to delete the app for good. Even Reddit isn’t half as bad as Sync when it comes to trackers and shady ads.
The great lengths people will go to just marginally improve their user experience. Just use a FOSS app that’s 99% of what Sync is but doesn’t have this BS
Or just use the web front end, which really does it all anyway.
we seriously need some kind of disclaimer for what duck duck go is doing on y’all’s phones. i don’t even use the app and i’ve seen a dozen posts exactly like this.
TLDR: ddg includes data from ANY website you visit from within the app’s built-in browser in its results. since basically every modern website is also a privacy nightmare, this will show up in ddg’s statistics
I’ve seen this exact post on every app’s community.
This is the problem with ads. That’s where this is coming from. Reddit serves it’s ads differently, so you don’t see the same glut of attempts.
Anything using admob throws up a shit ton of stuff like this.
Now, whether you choose to pay to remove them, or abandon the app is up to you (though I guess ad blockers are another option). But it isn’t sync directly doing this, it’s ads and sites you go to within the app.
Ddg really needs to add some granularity to how they label this stuff. It’s misleading
But it isn’t sync directly doing this, it’s ads and sites you go to within the app.
It is though, since the Sync dev is the one that added the ads in.
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The dev of sync put ads in his app…….he even specifically says that unless you pay to remove the ads you will be “tracked”.
Eh, I guess the results depend a lot on situational things. I only get a fraction of those trackers for Sync for example, and only from Google.
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That’s not how DDG’s app tracking protection works. It doesn’t trigger on websites. It’s not the links. It’s the ad service in the app. That’s why when you pay, the attempts stop. The dev himself said that the ad library doesn’t load when you’ve paid to remove ads (beyond doing an initial check to see if you’ve paid). Since paying stops the trackers in Sync’s ad library from loading, it no longer makes attempts and you won’t see it on this screen in DDG. If it really was the website, you’d still see it AND other Lemmy apps would show up here too, but they don’t.
You see a lot of links to Microsoft and google pages on the fediverse? I’m literally not sure I’ve ever seen one. Also isn’t the D double click?
Yes? Almost every page on the Internet has a sign in with Google/FB/Apple button or some other big companies API involved.
What are y’all getting linked to from here?
Just about any and every news site has a sign in that you can use Facebook or Gmail to log in, probably AppleID, but I don’t use Apple products so I’ve never noticed, as well as creating a site specific account to log in.
ETA: Look at the pic, it’s saying
GmailGoogle pulled data from within eBay.
That’s a very good point. Did you click any links?
These were the only (tracking) connections sync made in the past hour.
For the past 24 hours for 2k requests, it apparently made 64 requests for ads and 6 requests for trackers.
I’m not saying you are wrong or anything, but the stats may be more nuanced than you think so.
What are the actual urls? A lot of this stuff is often completely harmless, especially google… on an android phone
what app is this
DuckDuckGo app, it’s got a feature to block trackers across your phone. It isn’t a VPN but you turn it on as such. I use AdGuard’s DNS in my phone settings to block ads and trackers instead. Paste this link in your custom DNS field
How do I use this without disabling my firewall app? (NetGuard) I get an error saying that Android will only let me use one VPN at a time.
I’m not getting rid of NetGuard unless DDG can block apps from accessing the internet completely by default, like NG does (including system apps cause they spy on you too).
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I have no idea what this means, but I will google it. Thank you.
Honestly, I would suggest NextDNS to block ads within the app, so maybe you wouldn’t have to pay for blocking through Sync.
Or do not consent to the GDPR request form. Only for EU citizens though.
huh… how does that work ? would using a VPN allow me to see that form ?
I don’t know for sure but it would not surprise me. It could also be a localized distro in play store, but could still be a way to trick that with VPN or region settings in Google.
Get ready for the “let people enjoy things” brigade.
