After switching to a new smartphone which is not yet supported by LineageOS it was necessary to find other ways to protect my privacy and prevent Android, Google, installed apps and visited websites from calling home and snitching. After a quick search on F-Droid i found Blokada. This tool is simple and clever at the same time: It sets up a virtual VPN-Channel and therefore routes ALL (!) traffic through it. Traffic can be blocked if the called URL matches an entry of one of the many blacklists that are available within the software. You can whitelist apps that you don’t want to be blocked and even set up own blacklists. Within 2-3 weeks Blokada blocked about 25,000 requests to trackers and other websites. Theres also the possibility to contact a custom DNS-Server for queries. As metadata, and DNS requests are metadata, tells a lot about your internet behaviour i decided to switch to a DNS-Server which doesn’t tracks the URLs i am requesting like Free-DNS for example digitalcourage.
Having experienced a powerfull yet comfortable way to ensure my privacy on my most used device I wanted to take it even further to my laptop(s). The one running Windows10 should be as silent as my phone 🙂 After some research on the web i stumbled across another article at Netzpolitik.org. I tried all 3 tools but was most convinced by W10Privacy. This tool is firstly published under Creative Commons and secondly offers the greatest variety of privacy settings. Even, like Blokada, blocking traffic to Microsoft URLs. I took me some time to find out what configuration suited me best (blocking traffic to my Exchange Server for example was not smart 😉 but I am very happy now and thanks to Bernd Schuster my Windows10 is now silent like a fox.
