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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

The only reason you are so desperate for this feature is that Apple refuses to let you install a firewall on the phone you supposedly own. Otherwise you could be running pihole today.

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Not really. Pi Hole is great but it comes much later in the process and is an inexact process trying to filter out internet requests. The filter Apple has stops apps from being able to get the identifying data in the first place. It's a lot better.

PiHole only works insofar as tracking requests use a different domain. It’s great, but it’s not a panacea.

This would be different from a pi-hole, which counts entirely on separate domains.

I imagine Pihole is a just an example to illustrate a point. Once you have access to all network/http traffic, you can do an amazing amount of harm to ad-networks' ability to track and send you unwanted content. Imagine that kind of full access under the user's control. Not only that but you can cache/save/transform/manipulate how you receive the content you request on your device.

That's why the conspiracy-theorist in me thinks the tech companies have been pushing for HTTPs so heavily this past decade. It's "privacy" enabling sure, but at the same time makes it next to impossible to stop ad content and to break up tech data silos.

You could do that, maybe, but the typical non-technical user could not.

iPhones can easily have a Pi-Hole equivalent: https://nextdns.io/

No need for pi-hole, there’s an app for that and does exactly the same job.

How’ve you got it set up on not Apple? Sounds cool

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