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Comment by rvshchwl | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing to enable, but I think that smartphones contribute exponentially more data to Facebook services than laptops and browsers do. Smartphones give easy access to location, background running services, microphone. Even if you block these permissions to the app, Facebook gets the data from their data providers that use Facebook ads.

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On android you can use dns66[0] to use these sort of blocklists.

[0] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

Looks like a good alternative if you can't get root. It uses VPN to blackhole requests. If you have root, I'd use AdAway[0] which changes the hosts file directly.

[0] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.adaway/

Another great alternative is Blockada[1], it does the same as DNS66 and Adaway but in my experience does it felt much more reliable. It is available on f-droid[2]

[1]https://blokada.org/index.html

[2]https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.blokada.alarm/

"Exponentially" means nothing here. Perhaps you are looking for "orders of magnitude"

Well, he could be referring to the relative changes over time of what is contributed by a desktop computer and what is contributed by a smart phone. Antiprivacy features on phones seem to get better at a much faster rate than antiprivacy features on a computer.

[amount of data collected from phones]=[amount of data collected from desktops]^[some exponent]

If the exponent is less than 1 then the amount of data collected from phones is less than that from desktops.

When you hear 'exponential back off algorithm', do you envision one that keeps retrying faster and faster?

I'd say better than 50% chance that the delay increases. But the phrase would be unambiguous if it were called an "exponentially increasing back off algorithm".

This is unnecessarily pedantic. An exponential back off algorithm has a 100% chance of increasing the delay, that's the whole point. Nowhere other than pure mathematics would I see the phrase "exponentially" and even consider a <1 exponent.

My probability was for hearing the phrase "exponential back off algorithm" without knowing anything about the algorithm. I don't work in that field and had never heard of the term before the earlier post.

Experience suggests that most of the time when people say exponentially they mean an exponent greater than 1, but I have been surprised by what people have meant before so I personally wouldn't say that probability is greater than 90%. That's what I meant in more detail.

I think "needlessly" would work better than "unnecessarily" there.

Correction: For some reason I was thinking x^n where n < 1 rather than n^f(x). If f(x) monotonically decreases with x then what I said still applies.

For iPhones, enterprise management will allow you to set things like /etc/hosts. I do this with my phone.

I don't know what Androids do.

Can you explain this a little more? Can this be done on a personal phone? I was under the impression that the hosts file was essentially untouchable on an iPhone.

Google around - 'iphone mobile device management'. There's a service that's free for a couple devices[1]. Apple also makes a (terrible) app called Configurator. There are a bunch of others, but most of them are designed for (and priced for) corporate use.

You need to learn a little about what you're doing if you want to go this route, and there is some setup. But basically, you're taking on the role of a corporate IT department, pre-configuring and possibly locking down the phone.

I set up a profile in Configurator a few years ago and am a little afraid of touching it - that application makes iTunes look thoughtfully designed and stable.

[1] https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-now/

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