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by Barbing 55 days ago
Best iOS strategy that comes to mind is Safari:

  -iCloud Private Relay (native VPN-like thing)  
  -uBlock Origin Lite
  -AdGuard DNS
(Using fresh private tabs for small privacy gain?) Better than third-party skinned browsers right? Always happy to be informed otherwise.

(AdGuard does have an option to supplant uBlock in this stack btw, does “advanced” blocking https://adguard.com/kb/adguard-for-ios/web-extension/ which is nice but trust $mm-refusing uBlock dev gorhill forever)
1 comments
Anthony-G 55 days ago
This sounds like good advice so upvoted. I’m a big fan of Raymond Hill¹’s products so I am curious about how much benefit Adguard provides if uBlock Origin is already blocking online trackers, ads and other annoyances.

¹ In this case, the developer – not the musician. I really liked the user interface of uMatrix.

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Barbing 55 days ago
It’s really nice to have ad and tracker domains blocked systemwide though I think you need to be more careful and set your device up as supervised to have more robust blocking (real always-on VPN functionality vs. best effort?).

And even then when I read about defects in Apple software that means a firewall like Little Snitch isn’t perfect (macOS) I think an external device (mobile VPN router?) is going to be essential for some threat models.

(& uMatrix looks great!)

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Anthony-G 54 days ago
I can see how system-wide blocking would be useful. I’m personally very conservative and wary about apps that I install on my iPhone (I don’t use any ad-supported apps) so the browser is the “attack surface” that I’m most concerned about.

I already use uBlock Origin and iCloud Private Relay (as advised in your original post). I also use Private Browser tabs and regularly remove all “Website Data” from Safari (minor inconvenience in that I have to re-login to sites that I have an account on).

I’ve just installed AdGuard on my iPhone to try it out but see that the DNS protection requires a Premium subscription (it now occurs to me that I could possibly install Wireguard to connect to my VPS where I’m already running my own DNS server). I’ve also `never looked into supervised mode; I always assumed it wasn’t relevant for personal devices.

Thanks for the reply.

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