Logs to see tracking requests

CuriousFox

I've recently switched from an Android 11 phone to Pixel8 running GrapheneOS. Made a donation because I'm very happy with the stability of the system.
I'm running GrapheneOS with a permanent VPN connection via Wireguard to my home router. All my router traffic goes through PiHole. PiHole is set up as DNS and now shows in the dashboard that around 200 requests are blocked from my GrapheneOS phone. I have the same apps installed as on my Android 11 phone, also via PlayStore (now sandboxed PlayStore), yet on my Android 11 phone I had 0 blocked requests through the same PiHole and the same Wireguard connection.

So, I have 2 questions:
a) what gave the apps suddenly permission to track me (I'm sure it's a shitty Google thing, which I somehow agreed to, even though I don't actually want it).
b) How could I inspect the phone logs (and which logs) to see which are the responsible apps so I can kindly ask them to stop tracking me!

DeletedUser87

There are no system logs that let you trace requests. However, you could use something like RethinkDNS which not only provides a VPN and a DNS filter (like Pihole, just locally on your phone), but also has a firewall and logs of all connections made per app. With some investigative work you could find out which apps are doing what. Note that blocking DNS requests already eliminates the ability to trace the request in RethinkDNS.

I don't know if the DNS queries have actually increased after switching to GOS or if the fixes to VPN leaks by the GOS project actually make it look like there's more requests, while previously these would be routed around the VPN and thus "leak".

CuriousFox

DeletedUser87 thanks for the suggestion with RethinkDNS. I will check that out.

I still have my old phone. So, I could boot it up, install the same RethinkDNS to see if there are more requests there. That would show us if there's a Google setting which I now somehow enabled. Speaking of Google, do you know anything about a Google policy of enabling / disabling tracking requests at the PlayStore level?

DeletedUser87

CuriousFox depends on the apps. If you had FOSS apps installed through F-Droid for example, there's a chance these were stripped of trackers, while they're included in the Play Store builds. For closed source apps, no. Some apps also might generally stop talking if they notice Play Services missing (or rather fail to register to Firebase, technically speaking).
I think the best approach, is to actually compare the behavior to your old phone.