Fauxx is an open-source Android privacy tool that poisons data broker and ad-tech profiles by generating continuous, plausible, off-demographic synthetic activity from your device. The goal is simple: make your real behavioral signal statistically indistinguishable from noise.

Not my project, but though this is really cool and worth sharing.

  • racoon@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Your location can be triangulated reading neighbouring wifi SSID names, because every SSID and MAC identifiers are on a huge database scrapped by rolling slowly along every road and every street. Probably by the same people who took pictures for google maps and etc.

    • f3nyx@lemmy.ml
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      18 hours ago

      I’m going to be a little pedantic here, I hope you don’t mind.

      I wouldn’t say your location can be triangulated by SSID. you’re 100% correct about them being findable online, and that’s why its important to rotate your said every few months to a year. also, don’t be creative with it, just have it be the generic manufacturer string or something similar if you can.

      with that database, people can tell where you’ve BEEN, not where you ARE. it doesn’t necessarily compromise your immediate location.

      however, yes, it can assist with that. most phones, when not connected to WiFi, broadcast all the SSIDs they have saved in an attempt to connect to one of them. that’s another fingerprint. the caveat is that someone needs to be relatively close to you to be able to snoop those broadcasts, or have a device installed somewhere that’s snooping all traffic. in those cases someone is already following you or you’re (probably) in a fairly public place.

      this is also an easy one to foil. when you leave a location where you connect to WiFi, turn your WiFi off so that your phone isn’t constantly broadcasting for it. this saves battery as a nice bonus. grapheneOS enables this by default.