I want to download an ad blocker on my phone but one of the reviews says that it could spy on my internet traffic. Is this possible? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I’m new to this stuff.
Yes, it is possible and even probable for free proxies and certain ad blockers you’ll find in the App store or Play store
For AdBlock: it is safe. The VPN they install has 255.255.255.255 as the VPN server which is bogus.
They exploit the on-demand VPN feature of iOS. You can create a ruleset that a given list of domains is only allowed to be contacted when the VPN is up.
So now if you try to load an ad from a domain thats on their list, iOS will try to bring up the VPN which obviously fails resulting in the ad not fetched.
Hope this makes sense to you.
It’s a fake profile, they created it a VPN and use it to filter ads locally. Did you just downloaded AdBlock that is currently limited time free?
Ones that create a local VPN shouldn’t, but you can never be too sure unless you use an open source VPN app.
The app in question, I’m quite sure, is AdBlock by FutureMind. It’s free for iOS users for the next day or two. I use it, but I’m not a security expert and thus not qualified to speak as to its safety. From what I understand it’s safe as the VPN points to localhost and thus it’s safe… but again I am not an expert. My wife uses AdGuard on her Android phone and it does the same thing (per both apps’ descriptions).
Anyway, a lot of people in the free app thread are either concerned about the safety of the app, or straight up spreading FUD. Hopefully if someone gives a better answer than I can, that can be taken back to the thread and we can know one way or another. I’m not too concerned myself but it would be good to have a better source than my gut.
If we are talking iPhone I like Privacy Pro from Disconnect. I have had it on my phone for a while and it blocks ads & trackers in all apps. On my Mac I use uBlock Origin for Safari. I add the Disconnect list to it and it does everything I need (minus a VPN). I like both of these because neither one of them claim to collect any logs.
Yeah it’s AdBlock. Is it okay to use though?
I use ublock origin which is much better imo
I am not hundred percent sure but I will use it. Considering that they say the app does not send your traffic to a VPN server, and it’s normally a paid app.
Ublock isn’t on iOS.
Oh sorry didn’t realize that you were talking about a phone
I am trying Purify which I think is developed by the adblock origin people (I found the link to it from the adblock origins items). Steve Gibson recommended 1blocker a while back, if his recommendations carry any weight to you.
They both cost about 2$. And they both Save you that much money on bandwidth and battery life when it’s needed if you ask me.
Those apps only block ads in Safari.
Pretty sure that Purify is blocking it everywhere but I just started using it a couple days ago. Can you recommend one that works everywhere?
AdBlock by Future Mind.
Going with that. it seems that AdBlock creates a VPN profile which is really just a long list of known ad servers which redirect to 127.0.0.1 or something similar. Adguard Pro forces you to connect to their DNS server. I’d rather have the list on my phone than on a third party server which could shut down or redirect me at any time. Correct me if I’m wrong here. Thanks internet once again.