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Comment by quaffapint | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the tracking in the official app vs third party apps.

I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if Infinity goes away.

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> I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the tracking in the official app vs third party apps

I don't think many engineers use the official app.

> I don't think many engineers use the official app.

I get what you're saying... but you don't have to be an engineer to have a clue.

The demographic of Hacker News is primarily tinkerers/engineers. So it is relevant.

Do you know what those tracking queries were tracking or who they were talking to?

I use Apollo, and Reddit already knows everything I subscribe to and read, what more would they get from forcing me to use the official app?

It's probably easier for them to pipe all of that information to 3rd parties by embedding their tracking client-side.

They get your eyeballs for their ads. They want you in their engagement stats too.

I only use Reddit in the browser, and I've noticed uBlock Origin doesn't intercept nearly as much stuff from old.reddit.com - new Reddit just has a lot more tracking shenanigans.

If Infinity no longer works I'm done with Reddit.

Yeah, this is what gets me--and at least on IOS you can get a sense of this simply at looking at the difference in what data the app requests access to compared to e.g. Apollo.

From their privacy policy it looks like they may partner with data aggregators and onboard hashed identifiers (email, MAID etc) to join against and enrich their data. It should be very obvious to people why Reddit was pushing for an email on signup, using dark patterns, to get people off a much less identifiable method of authentication.

It seems it would enable them to connect it to various ad industry controls cookieless targeting solutions.

I kind of took it as a given that we weren't going to start using the official app due to assumed privacy issues.

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