Beware Of Deceiving Authenticator Apps on Apple and Google Devices
I am one of those people that viscerally hates online advertisement. In the year 2024, 99.999% of it in my humble opinion is extremely intrusive (both from a privacy and usability perspectives) and serves no positive customer goals. But don’t listen just to me for that - Cory Doctorow has an arsenal of data to back this opinion up that you can go through for your own horror and entertainment. Let alone the fact that there is so much malware that gets distributed through ad networks that this should be the sole reason to block ads everywhere you have an active internet connection.
What all of this means is that I will go out of my way to get ads blocked everywhere in my immediate proximity - uBlock Origin on Firefox is a must on all our family devices. Unfortunately, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers are on track to kneecap ad-blocking capabilities with Manifest V3, so Firefox remains the only viable option that can fully enable ad blocking with proper dynamic controls. Firefox Focus on mobile devices is a great way to browse the web in a bit more of a privacy-preserving way, since it blocks quite a few trackers. And of course, I’ve already talked on this blog how I think every household should try using a Pi-hole to block unwanted outbound traffic at the DNS level. But I digress.
One thing that the tools I mentioned above do not help with is advertisement embedded directly in experiences such as mobile app stores. If you have a mobile device manufactured any time after 2010, you likely have used one more than once to install whatever applications you need for your work and personal life. For Android it’s the Play Store, and for Apple - the App Store. Which leads me to the topic of this post and how the ads there are not as innocuous as you may think.
