afwall VS privacy-budget

I considered what many others have done: installing Gboard and using Graphene's settings to deny it network access, potentially even going the extra step of using a root firewall like AFWall (something I plan on looking into later regardless) but I was curious to see if I could do without.

AFWall?

AFWall+ can also do that. It needs root though.

AFWall+ (version 3.5.3): Control network traffic

The app is still getting commits. And there is no need to fork the project, people can just keep adding to the code using pull requests.

Check github here. A workaround has been script posted there try that.

"Android Firewall+ (AFWall+) is an advanced iptables editor (GUI) for Android. It provides fine-grained control over which Android apps are allowed to access the network." https://github.com/ukanth/afwall

Can I block using iptables on Android (I'm rooted)?

You can't block fingerprinting completely without breaking a ton of useful features. But the sandbox has a concept called the privacy budget which tries to determine if a site is collecting too much information. It should allow sites that actually use some of these features to continue to work.

The idea is that if sites that query fonts, engage canvas, read the user agent information, etc, they are likely trying to build a fingerprint, so the browser will start to return generic data.

Presumably - hopefully - it would allow users to set their own privacy budgets. Even better if it supports granular per-site control, which may be needed to certain specialized websites.

https://github.com/mikewest/privacy-budget

I don't think there are any plans to make this a pop-up. But it's still useful to move this entropy to be something that has to be actively collected: people can see which sites are collecting what information, and eventually browsers can start enforcing something like privacy budgets (https://github.com/mikewest/privacy-budget). You can't do these with something always sent automatically.

Someone from Chrome has proposed something similar in the form of a "privacy budget". Each fingerprintable surface gets a score and each origin has a budget. Once you go over, something(?) happens.

https://github.com/bslassey/privacy-budget

https://github.com/bslassey/privacy-budget