Fauxx - Privacy Through Deception

Fauxx runs believable fake browsing in the background, so the companies that profile you can't tell your real interests from the decoys. The decoy activity looks like real people with different interests from yours, not random noise that is easy to filter out.

HOW IT WORKS

Fauxx quietly searches, visits pages and makes DNS lookups across many topics, as a made-up person with a stable device identity. Your real interests get buried under a steady stream of coherent decoy activity, so data brokers and ad networks can't tell which "you" is real.

FEATURES

• Searches on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Yandex about topics far from your real interests; switch off any engine you want to spare
• Visits to a wide range of websites across dozens of topics
• Ad profile pollution: loads ad-heavy pages so ad networks see interests that aren't yours (it never clicks ads)
• Synthetic personas: a fake person with their own interests and one believable phone, replaced by a new persona every 30 to 90 days
• Separate cookies and site storage for each persona, on recent versions of Android System WebView
• Decoys steer away from you: optionally tell Fauxx about yourself, or import your advertising data from Google Takeout or Facebook
• Add your own searches and sites, such as local news in your language
• Optional custom DNS (encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS or a plain DNS server) for Fauxx's own traffic, so a Pi-hole or VPN that blocks tracker domains does not stop it
• DNS lookups for a wide spread of domains
• Natural timing: random gaps between actions and a daily rhythm, only during the hours you choose
• Full activity log with CSV, JSON and HTML export
• No accounts, no cloud storage, no analytics, no telemetry

OPTIONAL: TELL FAUXX ABOUT YOURSELF

Tell Fauxx your age range, gender, interests, profession and region, and its decoys will steer away from them. You can skip every question; the decoys then follow the synthetic personas alone.

PRIVACY FIRST

• Everything stays on your device
• Your profile, imported ad data and activity log are kept in an encrypted database (SQLCipher, with the key protected by the Android Keystore). App settings are stored unencrypted in the app's private storage.
• No analytics, no advertising identifiers, and no automatic crash reports: after a crash, Fauxx asks before you share a report
• Fully open source, so you can inspect the code
• Clear All Data wipes everything at once

Fauxx is free, open source and contains no ads.