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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Reminder: The NextDNS iOS app allows you to monitor and block these types of requests from all of your apps, via their DNS logging/filtering. (You can also configure the retention on the DNS logging, so as to not cause more toxic waste data.)

I can't recommend it enough. Until/unless we get something like Little Snitch for the phone (are you listening, Apple?!), this is the next best thing.

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NextDNS is great, set it up on all my devices a few back when there was a post on here about it. Uninstalled a few apps just from seeing the number of requests they were sending even when I didn't use those apps frequently.

Like its mentioned in this discussion, using the FB SDK will result in apps sending requests to FB. Found a banking app I use was doing this...

Are there any guides for running your own setup with similar filtering functionality? Not keen to run all my traffic through some unknown VPN.

NextDNS doesn't send the traffic, just DNS (and, entirely encrypted via DoH, unlike normal DNS), but if you're concerned about it, something like pi-hole does much the same thing, and is self-contained/self-hosted.

If it's not open source how do I confirm that for myself?

Agreed. I’d pay for a service that was a. open source and b. configurable to work with my own machines.

I deployed a VPN+PiHole on a micro ec2 instance for use from my iOS devices. Works great. First i installed pihole and configured, then used this https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup to setup the vpn. Took about 30 mins. Works great!

Why do you trust AWS more with your traffic than an ISP?

Because AWS is going to have to answer to pissed off Enterprise customers if there was ever a story to come out that they're handling customer data inappropriately.

For me the value is more about having ad blocking at the dns level and the vpn is just a way to get that on iOS/Android devices where I don’t control dns servers. When out and about on 4G, pages load a lot faster with all the garbage blocked.

I have PiHole as well. How to verify that FB SDK requests are blocked by it?

THIS! , thank you! just installed and found tons of queries to Uber (never used uber in past many months) , uninstalled it finally!

If you use any apps that have an 'uber here' integration (united, hyatt, opentable, stubhub, etc..) you'll probably still see that traffic.

Blokada has a similar feature set, with support for bundled advert/spyware/social media block lists as well as your own.