Permission Not Required: The Open Source App that Makes the Invisible Visible (Loupe Review)

This is a really good Techlore video. This video made me realize how much I dislike how GrapheneOS bans any mention of creators that once had situations with them. I do understand their perspective because I believe they were largely in the right in all of the situations, but there’s a difference between banning trolls like Braxman that post vast majority snakeoil information and technical disagreements with otherwise positive, if imprecise, creators or contributors. I’ll miss out on their perspective because of this behavior. At the end of the day the best moderation takes extreme nuance but has high standards for manners. More people should consider avoiding these websites and apps that are malicious to your privacy altogether. Of course it’s not easy, but it’s by far the most effective solution and I don’t think that other solutions are effective. Browser fingerprinting and app permissions are just really far behind the fingerprinting industry. Cookies are old news, browser fingerprinting is distrubingly effective at correlating anonymous users on normal browsers. Tor and Mullvad browser are likely the most and only effective privacy browsers at preventing commercial fingerprinting but they sacrifice usability and security. And I’m not even sure of their efficacy. Perhaps there’s research on the topic. I’d like to see a privacy focused anti detect browser like Donut browser with effective profiles. Donut browser is pretty cool because you can assign a proxy or VPN config per profile and the profiles aren’t detected as privacy hardened browsers, so you can easily sign up for things while seperating identities. I think Donut Browser is just like a launcher for different anti-detect browser profiles, so the app is open source but the browsers it launches aren’t. Could definitely be wrong on this. This is why LibRedirect or perhaps a MV3 version should be recommended more. It takes you off these websites automatically blocking any connection from the redirectee site. While content blockers likely don’t harm your privacy besides increasing attack surface, they are certainly completely ineffective at cross-site tracking because of fingerprinting. It’s a shame that browsers like Brave and Vanadium don’t meaningfully improve on fingerprinting protection. They’re essentially telemetry - less Chrome. I do highly respect Brave’s rust shields implementation for web enjoyment, however. Feel free to talk more on topic below me , this app is fascinating! PS Apple could massively improve privacy protections by simply banning apps from collecting this data and not allowing location tracking for apps that sell data. Apple has huge power with the App store, so I respect when they make good decisions like the tracking function, but they could do a shit ton more.