I’ve been using AdGuard’s DNS resolver on my Android phone for a couple of months, and I’m pretty satisfied with it.

The idea is that it filters out ad networks at the DNS level, so there is no need to root the phone (nor to install any app). You just put dns.adguard-dns.com in your “private DNS” settings and that’s it.

Recently, though, I’ve seen a couple of people around here mentioning how Adguard is not trustworthy, or “kinda shady”. What’s your take on them? Their privacy policy seems OK to me, but I’d be interested to know more about them.

  • Harrison@infosec.pub
    1·
    1 year ago

    There’s zero evidence of any wrongdoing or shadiness other than them having employees living in Russia. The company itself moved to Cyprus, many of their engineers left Russia, none of their servers are physically located in Russia, and they publicly disavowed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    This doesn’t mean Russia couldn’t apply massive pressure by threatening family members, etc, of course, but I personally have no concerns at this time and use AdGuard Home (their local adblocking DNS server) in my LAN and their iOS app on my devices. The iOS app in particular uses Apple’s content-blocking Safari tech so it should be completely safe so long as you don’t pay for a VPN or use a local VPN to block everything outside Safari.

    If you’re rooted on Android, definitely use AdAway instead, it just replaces the hosts file.

    https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html

      • Harrison@infosec.pub
        1·
        1 year ago

        Specifically, the way iOS content blocking works is guaranteed safe. All it does is write to a file loaded by the Safari browser to block content, the app can’t do anything at all itself. No indication any VPN sold by AdGuard (or the local device-wide fake VPN) is particularly unsafe that I’ve seen.

          • Harrison@infosec.pub
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah that’ll block all ads and trackers that’re possible without severe annoyance with a non fingerprinted browser etc.

  • deleted @sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    As an ad blocker/tracker blocker, AdGuard works really well.

    They also have a “browsing security filter” which may be of concern to some people. This filter, similar to smart screen and Google Safe Browsing, will check to make sure websites aren’t in a list.

    However, if you have it on, they have a section you can opt in (I think it is opt in) to send extra data to help with the security filter.

    That telemetry may seem like too much for some people, but I think it’s the only thing in AdGuard products that collects data, and even then, it’s not for making the filter better and helping its development, not for selling data.

    edit two weeks later: Fixed what I meant to say, thankfully people knew what I meant and upvoted.