Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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What's the consensus on AdGuard? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ominouslemon@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I've been using AdGuard's DNS resolver on my Android phone for a couple of months, and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

The idea is that it filters out ad networks at the DNS level, so there is no need to root the phone (nor to install any app). You just put dns.adguard-dns.com in your "private DNS" settings and that's it.

Recently, though, I've seen a couple of people around here mentioning how Adguard is not trustworthy, or "kinda shady". What's your take on them? Their privacy policy seems OK to me, but I'd be interested to know more about them.

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[–] Harrison@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There's zero evidence of any wrongdoing or shadiness other than them having employees living in Russia. The company itself moved to Cyprus, many of their engineers left Russia, none of their servers are physically located in Russia, and they publicly disavowed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

This doesn't mean Russia couldn't apply massive pressure by threatening family members, etc, of course, but I personally have no concerns at this time and use AdGuard Home (their local adblocking DNS server) in my LAN and their iOS app on my devices. The iOS app in particular uses Apple's content-blocking Safari tech so it should be completely safe so long as you don't pay for a VPN or use a local VPN to block everything outside Safari.

If you're rooted on Android, definitely use AdAway instead, it just replaces the hosts file.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html

[–] brcl@artemis.camp 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why do you mention paying for a VPN as unsafe?

[–] Harrison@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Specifically, the way iOS content blocking works is guaranteed safe. All it does is write to a file loaded by the Safari browser to block content, the app can't do anything at all itself. No indication any VPN sold by AdGuard (or the local device-wide fake VPN) is particularly unsafe that I've seen.

[–] brcl@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So if I just use private relay and AdGuard should be enough?

[–] Harrison@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah that'll block all ads and trackers that're possible without severe annoyance with a non fingerprinted browser etc.