Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

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In Developer options you can select a mock location app like Private Location[1], and there is an app named Shelter[2] that allows you to freeze and unfreeze (depending on what you mean by the terms, you may want the last mentioned app, see [3]) applications in your personal and work profile (and to isolate and run multiple instances of apps using Work Profiles). Additionally, you might find SuperFreezZ App stopper[3] useful and it might be what you are looking for. It allows you to entirely freeze all background activities of apps (unused apps, too, automatically). All of the apps mentioned work without root, and are worth checking out.

[1] Private Location - https://redplanet.gitlab.io/fdroid-website/en/packages/com.w...

[2] Shelter - https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

[3] SuperFreezZ App stopper - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/

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EDIT: According to https://f-droid.org/pl/2023/10/19/twif-client-alpha-kde-remo...,

> Private Location was also removed as was no longer functioning and development has stopped years ago, as reported in #3096 (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/3096).

That is a shame. The other applications are fine, at least.

Wasn't Private Location removed from the store though? If it's the app that I'm thinking about I used it before but it stopped working because the map API changed which broke the app and it never got updated, so it was removed. There should be a github issue about that somewhere.

You are right. I made the necessary corrections.

My concern with apps like Shelter, Insular and Island is: who guards the guards? How confident can I be that an xz-type attack hasn’t been made on them? Who are the individuals behind such projects, and what nation-states and influences are they subject to?

You could ask the same questions about Google or Apple or any of the countries that have jurisdiction over them.

The best answer is to make the sensitive parts open source. Then anyone can review it themselves if they're so inclined, including you. And since some software developers and large organizations actually do this, it's difficult to get backdoors into popular projects without anybody noticing.

Notice that the xz attack was detected before it made it into e.g. Debian Stable or the distributions based on it.

The best answer to "who watches the watchers" is everybody. The prerequisite for which is for everybody to be able to see what's going on in the places where there could be something fishy happening.

I can't find private location in the f droid app and the APK downloads don't work. I tried fake traveler but it was crashing constantly and was not able to fool organic maps

Apparently it was removed for the reasons mentioned in my edited comment. Thank you for pointing this out.

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