[nonplus]

I would also like to hear more on this, a quick look at TrackerControl's readme tells me it mainly functions as a blocklist. Which (I would think) the moment you turn off tracker control to use google maps (or whatever play services app you wanted to use for a moment), said app will send a flood of queued location data that it has been collecting in the background if allowed.

I suppose that setup could work if the user is disciplined about not letting apps that use play services run at all when not in active use, but at that point I don't see the advantage to using tracker control at all.

[Aachen]

> the moment you turn off tracker control to use google maps...

No, it works per app. I'm also a TC user, it's quite great. Per app you tell it whether it should allow talking to various motherships. You can toggle on broad categories (for a given app) or also more fine-grained. It also logs which services applications tried to contact, so I can see that Spotify that I pay for is trying to send god knows what to Facebook (and that TC blocks it).

It takes a bit of setup because a ton of apps talk to a ton of centralized services (Aurora store and Newpipe obviously need to talk to Google, for example), but after that I'm a lot less bothered by apps including the Facebook sdk or something because it'll be stopped anyhow.

I'm waiting for the day that apps/websites stop telling your phone/browser to rat on you and they start doing it server-side. Lot less gdpr trouble because nobody can check what you're doing and goodbye blocklists. But so far it seems things don't yet work that way.

[nonplus]

Played with TC for an hour or so this evening, and what I stated above (possibly poorly) still stands. I chose google maps in particular, because it is an application that requires telemetry data to function; but it is reasonable for an individual to not want to be tracked when not using google maps.

If I block infinitedata-pa.gogleapis.com, maps will not function, but google maps will continue to collect telemetry data on my phone if it is running and has permissions. It will save that collected data until a user unblocks essential monitoring in order to use maps (Unless the user clears cache/data, or uninstalls maps, before unblocking).

That is the case I am pointing out, tc is a stopgap (and a welcome/useful one) but it does _not_ provide users a way to prevent _collecting_ of telemetry data to be sent off the device. It just delays the sending until the applications use is more valuable than the users privacy.

Edit: Things that could help with that:

1. Physical kill switches for radios (I know, that's not going to happen from any major arm cpu maker, the SOC is integrated, but it's the most practical solution.).

2. Granular permissions settings for androids network location provider. As an example, A permission that if app is running in the background send spoofed location data back (Once again, it's not that simple telemetry data is coming from many sources, I'm just listing what solves the problem.).