moralcode / pihole-antitelemetry

A research-based starter pihole list to improve your privacy

pihole-antitelemetry

Research shows Google collects 20x more data from Android than Apple collects from iOS. Block both using these pihole lists.

Project Goals and FAQ

The purpose and goals of this blocklist are outlined in the FAQ

The lists

For a list of domains that should not break anything, use telemetry-domains.txt.

If you want to also block domains that are not well-tested, add telemetry-domains_beta.txt to the list.

Domains that are known to break user-facing services or apps are moved to telemetry-domains_borked.txt for use at your own risk.

These lists are maintained with help from the community. Any efforts to help sort domains into the correct blocklists will help others better block non-consensual telemetry.

Import blocklist

On the Pi-hole admin page, go under Group management > Adlists > Add a new adlist

You can add a new list either by URL or by local path:

• By URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MoralCode/pihole-antitelemetry/main/telemetry-domains.txt
• By local path: file:///local/path/to/blocklist.txt.

( ! ) To apply the changes you need to run pihole -g or update your gravity list online: http://<YOUR-PIHOLE_SERVER>/admin/gravity.php

Existing lists

• NextDNS apple list
• mischosts apple telemetry list
• https://decloudus.com/
• https://filterlists.com/
• https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker

pihole-antitelemetry's Issues

Blocking gstatic.com

While google does track you with this site, it's mostly used ad a CDN, breaking a lot of sites

Potentially safe domains

https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Albert

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/how-imessage-sends-and-receives-messages-sec70e68c949/web

mesu.apple.com domain

adding mesu.apple.com might be a good idea. It seems to ping a lot though it also seems to break downloading apps made by apple such as “news”

invalid domains on telemetry_domains_beta.txt

app−measurement.com
growth−pa.googleapis.com
iphone−ld.apple.com
mobilenetworkscoring−pa.googleapis.com
profile.gc.apple.com

organize domains and catalog what information each one collects

Would like to add information about what each domain is used for/what information is collected according to the results of the paper. This can help people understand which domains they want to blocked and what else may be affected.

What other blocklist formats should be supported?

What other blocklist formats are out there that people would like to see supported?

This is primarily a voting issue for people to leave a comment to mention their preferred format and upvote ones they would like to see added.

`bag.itunes.apple.com` necessary for iOS App Store

Hey, thank you for these awesome blocklists!

I started using the beta blocklist file and recognized that bag.itunes.apple.com is needed for the iOS app store to be able to load.

Add servers from more papers and other sources

https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DCN-Google-Data-Collection-Paper.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=016QGxOsjQY

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf (https://youtu.be/-QSr5eKjMjA)

Create a script to help automate simple changes to the csv domain list

the UPDATING guide in this repo details some quirks and weird workarounds regarding how the CSV should best be edited.

It may be helpful to create an additional python script that allows a domain name and list name to be passed as a parameter so it can automatically update the list of every instance of that domain to the new list.

Related: #9

Check additional information PDF for more domains

there is a pdf (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qaazwyaj2ihj4qa/apple_google_additional_material.pdf) linked in the first article to more information about the connections made, which may contain more domains than are in the initial article.

Would like to have these included in domains.csv too

Telemetry file is empty

Hi!
Why is the file empty?
https://github.com/MoralCode/pihole-antitelemetry/blob/main/telemetry-domains.txt
It doesn't make sense to block nothing...
Thanks

Domain name formatting

as mentioned in the UPDATING file, there are some domains in the list that represent the same domain but differ by a commonly confused character (like dashes, em dashes, and en dashes). Theres also a few that look like two characters smushed together (I think there's one like that for fi in a couple places). These are likely due to copy-paste errors or from parsing the PDF, however I want to be sure that these different domains have no chance of being valid or in-use domains at all before removing them as this may be a tactic used by google/Apple .etc to evade domain-based blocks using common confusable characters.

For this issue I would like to:

• look into the validity criteria for a domain name to determine what unicode/funky characters are or are not allowed by the spec
• replace these characters with the canonically correct version(s) and update the id field for any groups of entries that represent the same domain and are merged with an existing category

This will likely be necessary to have complete before #10 will be able to work properly as that relies on having a consistent domain list

Validation of block lists

I think it would be both interesting and useful to replicate some of the methods used from the linked papers as a means of validating domains in the beta and borked lists to gather some evidence to promote them to the main list.

That said there are other ways to help improve these lists, namely just by adding the beta and/or borked lists to your own pihole installation and report any domains that are in a list that they should not be in (i.e. domains in beta that break apps and services).

Since this repository is mainly intended as a community resource to gather information on these domains, any contributions you can make will ultimately benefit other pihole users and blocklist creators.

find a better way to manage and maintain the spreadsheet

as seen by #4, the domains.csv is a spreadsheet of all the domains that were either part of the original paper or were submitted by users to this repo or on Reddit. Maintaining it in a CSV seems a bit cumbersome, so I'm looking for alternative ways to maintain this list as a community resource, ideally under version control.

Looking for ideas for how to do this. Using a shared, public-comment google doc seems pretty counter to the goals of this repo (and Id prefer an open, or at least minimally harmful-to-users platform anyway). Currently thinking of using a GitHub Wiki for this but maintaining it as a markdown table doesn't seem very portable/usable to other blocklist maintainers.