I know I am going to get some hate for this but I just vibe coded a bus tracker to use on my iphone, because I was not about to use the cities app. I am trying so hard to climb out of Apple’s walled garden, my next phone is going to have grapheneOS on it and I will be so much more happier.
Get TrackerControl from the f-droid store. You get to see what the app reaches out to, via an internal VPN to capture traffic. And it let’s you block things in a granular fashion
Don’t use the Google playstore version, as Google forced them to make it a view only tool and not a blocking tool.
One installed it shows as TC in the app names
Looking at their repo I’d advise against it as the app is primarily AI coded.
It wasn’t before, its been around longer than the AI mess, maybe they are jumping on the bandwagon now. Alpha was out in 2019, and around 2021 they had to remove the VPN blocking to suit Google, so fdroid had the true version. That github repo only starts in 2024
that’s disappointing and would explain why I felt like it started letting stuff through more recently. I’ve been using Rethink lately and that seems to be pretty good so far
Yeah it definitely changed recently, even the interface, but originally came out in 2019, before vibe coding nonsense.
Every app said something like “does not sell any user data to third parties and data brokers” but not that they do not provide it. They may give it freely (to authorities, for example) whether allowed to or not. They may give it in exchange for something other than money.
The phrasing has that excessive specificity of someone who follows the letter of the law but delights in loopholes.
I have reached the point where I regularly leave my phone at home, in the car, at a friend’s for a bit, etc. And that’s even though I use grapheneOS.
I don’t use wearables, I use web tools instead of apps whenever possible, and use random vpn locations on my other systems. But not everyone can do that, and these loopholers are taking far too much advantage.
Honestly, even just a flip phone for calls & texts (OK maybe one with a keyboard for the latter) and the "smart"phone for other crap like grocery lists (I need screenshots for price matching).
The Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada declined an interview, but a spokesperson said Marketplace’s findings raise “a number of concerns.”
Ha LoL, oups. Haha. We didn’t do our job there, did we
