Just realized that phone came with a bunch of “hidden” Meta/Facebook services pre-installed and they cannot be uninstalled, so I guess me trying to “fight” WhatsApp is pointless anyway. 🤪

… and then people call me a “luddite”. 🤣🖕

@prologic@twtxt.net I guess any Android phone is like that, except maybe for the Google Pixel stuff. It’s a shit ecosystem. And so is the iPhone world. It’s all proprietary garbage.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this whole thing of pre-installed third-party apps doesn’t exist on the iPhone. So that appears to be a bit better. You’re still sharing data with Apple and it’s next to impossible to tell what exactly the device does or does not do (just like with Android). If you can’t easily install your own OS, then it’s a lost cause.

Best you can do with any of these devices is disconnect them from the Internet.

@prologic@twtxt.net I guess I’m more “strict” than you are, probably. DNS queries tell me very little about which data is actually sent to those servers.

On the other hand, this is probably a reasonable argument: The vast majority of users have no idea what a DNS query even is (and they don’t care to begin with), so trying to hide something here is probably not worth the effort for Google/Apple. This would make filtering DNS requests more meaningful after all.

(But you can’t be sure and that is driving me nuts. I don’t want to deal with this in the first place.)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com That’s good to know. 🤔 Luckily, the phone wasn’t full of 3rd party stuff. There were so few of them actually, that I didn’t really bother looking. That’s why I only found out recently about that Meta stuff.