this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
25 points (96.3% liked)
Privacy
31850 readers
124 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thank you. That’s very helpful.
And yep, https://www.abc.net.au/news is exactly one of the sites I was thinking of. I notice their app makes many calls to firebaselogging-pa.googleapis.com and similar. Sending who knows what.
Moving to the web version I’m hoping can blunt such things. On iOS I use AdGuard, Hush, and StopTheMadness. https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html tells me I’m not doing too bad in terms of ads and tracking.
Two others which are pretty bad with their apps but have very similar webpages:
https://touch.footytips.com.au/home https://www.afl.com.au/
For news in particular, RSS feeds are a great option if you can find them. No ads, no Javascript, purely chronological sorting of articles. Here's some feed links for SBS, for example: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/feeds/nbv1rs3kw I highly recommend the open source app NetNewsWire for iOS.
Yes! Excellent advice!
I am a big fan of RSS and have been using it as my primary source of info for at least a decade.
I actually already had SBS but only just now realised that ABC pages (eg “just in”) can be entered directly and it’ll find the RSS version (using Reeder at least).
Do you have advice about how to centralise/organise RSS? I use Feedly as a cloud source that I point Reeder at (have also been playing with Fiery Feeds). But I can’t help but think there’s a better way that doesn’t involve a third party (again, privacy).
Nice! I actually didn't know they had RSS feeds at all, so I'm going to help my news junky friend get set up with them. Thanks for the tip on the ABC RSS! :)
Right now I've got NetNewsWire configured to use my iCloud account (which uses CloudKit under the hood), so that syncs my iPhone and iPad. This still involves a 3rd party - Apple's magic hosted database service thing - but I'm ok with this for now.
Ideally I would set up something like FreshRSS and host it on one of my own servers. FreshRSS exposes the old Google Reader API which NetNewsWire and Reeder can use to sync feeds. Personally I'm not interested in the FreshRSS web interface and I'm not too keen on running a PHP app either. So I'm considering writing my own service which serves the bare minimum required to be able to point apps like NetNewsWire and Reeder at.