Privacy

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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.

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forced to buy an echo for new house. any suggestions? (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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my family is moving into a much bigger house than we used to have. we use amazon echos as an intercom system through the announcement feature. because our house is bigger, i’m being forced to get one myself for my room. i haven’t needed one for years because i use their app on my phone and i can see their announcements as a notification and i can also kill off most of its tracking by DNS. unfortunately my parents don’t understand this and are forcing me to get one. what can i do to limit its tracking?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

MSCHF made a device called an Alexagate, which jams the microphones using ultrasound and is turned on and off by clapping.

It's a bit expensive, though ($100).

https://alexagate.com/

Otherwise, as you mentioned, you can use DNS to block the tracking. NextDNS has a built-in blocklist specifically for Alexa.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

thanks for the suggestion! as for nextDNS, i was already thinking of using this however you cannot change the DNS servers used on alexa devices. i was thinking of setting up openWRT on a pi and using that as a router specifically for our alexa devices with a nextDNS profile installed, but im not sure if alexa’s default to the router’s DNS or amazon’s. even if it does use the router’s DNS, does it backup to Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8) like Roku does?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

With opnwrt you can do DNS hijacking, where you force redirect DNS requests for other servers to your own DNS server. This works as long as they aren't encrypted (DNS over HTTPS or TLS), which most devices don't use.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

that’s sounds great! thanks for telling me

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I specify my LAN DNS servers (2 pihole instances, main + a backup for redundancy) in my routers DHCP settings, so they are the DNS servers handed out to all LAN clients; then I have an iptables rule on the router blocking all port 53 traffic from leaving the network unless it came from those LAN DNS servers. This means only the piholes can reach external dns; everything else is required to use the LAN DNS servers or receive no response. Then the piholes have full control over what can and cannot resolve to an IP.

I haven't found a device that doesn't work with this setup. I used to have a couple google homes before I wised up, they worked fine behind this setup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wow thats very interesting. Ill try to so the same on my network

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

https://youtu.be/EdzDCkFaskc?si=F8FB0Xn28YeZ9N90

I'm doing this and it works great.

When my server turns off everything stops working which is interesting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Awesome, thanks for the link! Ill get that setup up in my env