I set up a Raspberry Pi 3 with AdguardHome for a friend of mine, and told him to disconnect everything at home and try to watch anything on his phone, being the only device using his home’s internet.
He just sent me this, and now he’s ready to #degoogle 🤣🤣🤣
He says there were hundreds in less than 5 minutes.
Ohhhh no, his phone checked to see if it was connected to the Internet! The horrors!
If you’re OK with that, good for you. I certainly dont want any of my devices hitting any server I didn’t explicitly approve of, especially not 100s of times in a few minutes. To each his own. You evidently don’t know what that means, enjoy.
It’s only happening that many times because you are blocking it, so it thinks it is disconnected and is checking to see if it managed to reconnect.
I, too, would like to know what it means
What it means is that your devices and browsers are constantly pinging Google under the guise of “serving static content to speed up connection”. This is where each of us needs to determine what makes sense and what doesn’t. If I’m hitting sites not owned by Google, why does Google have to know about it? And even if they “need to know”, which they dont, why do you have to check so many times in a row in such short periods of time? Its all about knowing what you’re doing at all times, which comes with the added stress of them using up your data if limited, and slowing down your connection, however slightly it may be. Therefore, to each his own. I dont like that, so I block it. You dont mind? Fine, have at it, that’s your right. What I will certainly keep doing is trying to steer people away from just letting Big Tech do whatever they want, and that’s done by informing what these companies do, how and how often. Some people will care, and maybe even do something about it, others won’t and maybe even try to convince others that there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, to each his own.
Looking at how often requests happen is a red herring though. Your phone could be collecting data on you for a week and then send a single request with all of it. But I see lots people going “look how many requests” as if it was indicating anything. It’s bad that the requests are happening in the first place, but it doesn’t mean much that there are 10 requests at once or 1 request per hour.
In fact most analytics SDKs for mobile apps cache the events locally and send them in batches at some larger interval of time. And these single rarer requests are much more damaging to your privacy then lots of connectivity checks that don’t actually send any significant data.
there are hundreds because they got blocked.
android phones actively retry connectivity checks every 3 seconds until a successful connection is achieved, then it ramps down to a check every 5 minutes, and the default server is google’s. (this functionality is used for the little exclamation mark next to the wifi icon if there’s no internet connection)
no data is sent along that request (it’s just a GET request), not even useragent etc (the only thing google gets is the source of the request, aka the ip address, which is basically meaningless if it’s not associated with any other data)
you should actually be able to point that domain to any ip that responds with empty body + http 204 code to /generate_204 and it should work as expectedUn-de- the English languange from Latin influence. Ungoogle yourself!
