35C3 - How Facebook tracks you on Android

They shouldn't be sending me to the Play Store ITFP. I can't use Play because I've got no GApps in my phone, so I can't try their app unless I find a copy "somewhere" and convince myself it hasn't been poisoned. I got a reasonably up-to-date Firefox through APKPure, and later on after watching that 35C3 talk [1], I unzipped and grepped all those saved .apks to find the APKPure app itself and Firefox and LingoDeer had the same traces of Facebook's SDK in them. So that's off the table, huh? The ones that I saved from older phones after having gottten them through Play were all fine, but I can't update those without grabbing another phone and letting Google ... play in it. <ducks> Just the other day I asked the Waterfox team for an apk and an md5sum, for the same reason-- though I'd settle for the md5sum alone! But Mozilla has resources WF can barely dream of, and it apparently intends to be a champion for privacy, so this is kinda sad. [1] [this video]

the first things most apps try to do is attempt to connect w/ graph.facebook.com at launch (and periodically) this is true for your banking apps to music apps like Pandora and Spotify you can get Netguard, which functions as VPN/Firewall and get visibility into the data exfilitration that is happening right now on your Android phone (and block some of it). Similar things should exist on iPhone too CCC had some coverage recently, but this has been happening for a long long time - [this video] * google apps are also constantly trying to phone home and panic when they cannot connect to the mothership, causing signficant battery drain... I haven't seen them trying to call facebook directly though