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I'm trying to decide whether or not to use the Your Phone app on Windows, and not finding much information on it.

It requires a Microsoft account, but I don't really see why that should be necessary for a local connection between my phone and my computer. It makes me wonder about the privacy implications.

This page claims the following, but I find it unsatisfactory:

Your Phone relies on local connections through Wi-Fi (the iPhone also needs Bluetooth), but the system never takes your data and stores it on Microsoft's servers. When disconnected there is no maintained data, but rather a local cache on the user's PC for some items.

In particular, "relying" on local connections and not "storing" it on Microsoft's servers is not the same thing as "never sending data over the internet" to begin with. What I want to know is if they transmit any of my phone (or PC's...) data over the internet in the first place, or whether all data stays local to my network. If they send some of my data over the internet but promise not to look at it, that is not the same thing to me as not sending it in the first place.

So: does the app send any kind of data from my phone over the internet (except my login credentials, obviously)?

Is there a way to ensure it keeps all my data within the LAN (whether it's app data, SMS, call, whatever)?

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    KDEconnect has been working flawlessly for years with absolutely no need for a central server, it's probably just meant to trick people to sign in to a windows account.
    – user000001
    Nov 30, 2020 at 8:11
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    @user000001: Great to know, thanks!
    – user541686
    Nov 30, 2020 at 8:45
  • `@user541686 To be clear, I have been only using it on linux, but there is a port for windows available, not sure how stable the windows port is.
    – user000001
    Nov 30, 2020 at 8:54
  • @user000001: I just tried it and the problem is it can't seem to do the one single thing I was trying to do: access my apps from my PC.
    – user541686
    Nov 30, 2020 at 9:15

1 Answer 1

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Your data is sent to the internet, yes.

I think that the connection phone-app that "your phone" does is somehow similar to Whatsapp Web's, your data is sent to the internet and received from your computer, but not stored anywhere.

You can test this, try to connect with the phone connected 4g and your PC on Wi-Fi. It must work.

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