I have noticed that some recommend brave browser and vanadium for GOS. It seems like I'm the only one to notice or care about the privacy concerns with Brave browser, let me explain. Brave browser pings "www.gstatic.com" every time you boot up the app. I have checked DNS logs using Next DNS and confirmed that Brave browser does ping google upon initial start of the app. I have tried multiple devices with clean installs.

I also noticed that brave pings ESPN, Instagram, Amazon, and eBay when opening the app. However these connections are made due to the shortcuts on the new tab page. Removing and disabling these shortcuts from the new tab page reduces these connections but brave still pings them once in a while.

One could use next DNS and block these connections however I would like to use the DNS provided by the VPN service I use and I don't want to stand out from other users using that VPN server. Vanadium is great at security but brave browser includes features for fingerprinting and has a much bigger user base making it better for users to blend in, increasing privacy.

Did anyone else discover these connections? If so, are there any solutions that could be recommended?

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    I think www.gstatic.com is a for getting fonts from Google

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    outpost7344 just saw these connections, although they seem intermittent as I'm not able to get them to produce even after opening and closing brave/tabs, etc.

    Just block them with next

    To your point, I run nextdns over VPN. Can't have your cake and eat it to that I'm aware of. So it's either the possibility or being finger printed easier or the known fact that your device is sending telemetry.

    Wow. This is a surprise to me. I recently posted I am happy with Vanadium as a new GOS user, but I use Brave on another phone running Android. Privacy Guides (which seems legit) recommends it. They also recommend Mullvad and Firefox (the latter I used for years previous). Brave gives you speed. May be going back in time.

    GrapheneOS replaces the minor Google services used by AOSP and Chromium. Chromium is a lot different than AOSP since it has all the Chrome code for using Google services included as part of the open source project. AOSP doesn't really support using any proprietary Google services but rather only uses Google for standard services like connectivity checks, network time, DNS fallback, SUPL, PSDS and key provisioning which are not Google-specific services and can be done by others too.

    This wasn't a high priority for us compared to other more important work but it's a completed feature for quite a while now and we make sure it doesn't regress by hosting any new services that are required such as when we added key attestation. The key attestation proxy will likely need to be updated for Android 14.

    The default connections made by GrapheneOS and Vanadium are covered in https://grapheneos.org/faq#default-connections along with a separate section explaining connections triggered by installing apps, using a carrier and other changes from a fresh install. The default connections are fully covered. Covering every kind of connection made by the OS based on apps is a much broader amount of work and the scope is unclear, such as whether it makes sense to cover apps with the Network permission using an API like DownloadManager. We may implement proxies for some features like DRM key provisioning but we currently change protected video support in Vanadium to require requesting permission by default so it's not triggered unless you enable it or install an app using it.

    Vanadium is going to have a lot of additional privacy and security features added to it, similar to the OS. We've had very limited resources to improve it and we have very high standards for the features we're going to be including. Completed state partitioning, additional fingerprinting resistance, data export/import and ad blocking are examples of features planned over the next year or so. The approaches taken in these areas in other browsers have significant issues and we need to decide on the best way to approach them for Vanadium. For example, Brave and Firefox left major holes in their cookie partitioning to avoid breaking lots of sites including cross-site login flows which can be abused for the same kind of cross-site tracking as without the feature. We tried out strict cookie partitioning but it breaks too much to be enabled by default and we'll need to consider the best approach to use. We could offer different tiers as an optional with a heuristic approach as the default, but we don't want to add a ton of complexity right now. Over time, there will be fewer features people want missing from Vanadium.