my apologies for the long screenshot. i had purchased adguard’s vpn service for five years since its primary adguard service is well know in the iapple ecosystem.
on android, though, their app appears to send data to a lot of third-parties. has it always been this compromised? am i a fool to go for their vpn services as well?
How exactly are you using the duckduckgo app protection and a vpn simultaneously? DDG sets itself up as a local vpn to be able to track outgoing traffic, and Android doesn’t support concurrent connections. Or is that what adguard does in the background while not active?
would you have done this with the ad guard vpn deactivated but the app still running in the background?
I’ve been using the app for a few montha now and it’s only today that it got flagged in the DDG report. it’s not shown up before.
Hey I gave it a second try with another tool: PCAPdroid and I’m not sure what I’m looking at … Adguard VPN seems effectively to send a lot of traffic to strange DNS requests…
Just by opening the app and loggin in a fake account I got over 200 requests…
I’m not an expert but those requests seem sketchy !!!
So at this point you’re still not connecting the VPN or anything? This is just after you log in?
Edit: I’m remembering that some VPN services use users devices as a server of their own, proxying connections for other users on another service. I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you don’t have Tiktok and Snapchat both installed then I’d say that’s likely what’s going on. I’ve never used AdGuatd, there are much better VPN services.
I’m gonna say you have Tiktok and Snapchat installed on your phone? The rest of those are just random services (CDNs, ads, analytics, bug reporting, etc) that background apps (some are from Tiktok and Snapchat, but tons of apps use the same ones) are connecting to.
Set up NextDNS on your phone without any VPN running and odds are you’ll see the same.
wow. this is good detail, indeed!
so is this an app one should avoid using, then?
Selling? Probably not.
But I used NetGuard to see specific requests that the AdGuard VPN app made. Then I downloaded AdGuard VPN and opened it. Without even logging in, it pinged:
- dns.google
- dns.alidns.com (Alibaba)
- 2400:3200:baba::1 (Alibaba again)
- cloudflare-dns.com
I don’t know why it feels the need to ping so many DNS servers before you even type a username, but it does.
You are using that Duckduckgo thing which is not a reliable source of information.
I would be interested in what a “tracking attempt” would look like.
Your VPN sees EVERYTHING you connect to, if you use HTTPS that is not a big deal but can help target stuff to your usage.
If it is tracking or just traffic passthrough is decided on their servers, which no weird Duckduckgo app can access.
i get what you’re saying, but the vpn was inactive when the app sent these requests. DDG was active at the time and using the VPN slot.
so it isn’t the vpn functionality, per se, of the app that’s doing anything here.
Thanks, I think it is very relevant to understand how this DDG VPN “tracker blocking” works.
If it is about an app sending requests to lots of domains, this may have many reasons. For example it could check the IP addresses of all these tracking serverers to block apps from communicating with them via IP and not URLs.
This would be a reason that a trusted app connects to tracking servers to update their internal filterlist.
This “known to collect” seems to be unrelated to the actual connection, just “this service often collects data about x”.
If this is true, that is HIGHLY misleading and please update your post to explain that possibility.
this is a possibility. one that i haven’t accounted for.
but is there any literature that verifies this? the closest I’ve found in context is this page, and I’m not able to resolve what you’re saying with whats on there: https://adguard.com/kb/general/ad-filtering/filter-policy/
i don’t have enough info yet to update the post with this conjecture.
Don’t use proprietary software as it is not good for privacy or freedom
