this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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You are using that Duckduckgo thing which is not a reliable source of information.
I would be interested in what a "tracking attempt" would look like.
Your VPN sees EVERYTHING you connect to, if you use HTTPS that is not a big deal but can help target stuff to your usage.
If it is tracking or just traffic passthrough is decided on their servers, which no weird Duckduckgo app can access.
i get what you're saying, but the vpn was inactive when the app sent these requests. DDG was active at the time and using the VPN slot.
so it isn't the vpn functionality, per se, of the app that's doing anything here.
Thanks, I think it is very relevant to understand how this DDG VPN "tracker blocking" works.
If it is about an app sending requests to lots of domains, this may have many reasons. For example it could check the IP addresses of all these tracking serverers to block apps from communicating with them via IP and not URLs.
This would be a reason that a trusted app connects to tracking servers to update their internal filterlist.
This "known to collect" seems to be unrelated to the actual connection, just "this service often collects data about x".
If this is true, that is HIGHLY misleading and please update your post to explain that possibility.
this is a possibility. one that i haven't accounted for.
but is there any literature that verifies this? the closest I've found in context is this page, and I'm not able to resolve what you're saying with whats on there: https://adguard.com/kb/general/ad-filtering/filter-policy/
i don't have enough info yet to update the post with this conjecture.
You need to contact them, if they connect to known to-be-blocked sites to get their IPs.
Googerteller does this:
And I would ask DDG how their "tracker blocker" works and if it would also block such requests.0