I think we all draw a line between privacy and convenience and I think I found mine and settled into a comfort zone of sorts. I use Fedora 38. My browser is Mozilla Firefox with it’s “strict” setting. uBlock origin and uMatrix. When I need/want to use a site that doesn’t work due to blocked connections I relax the restrictions in uMatrix or temporarily disable it entirely if I get frustrated or I’m in a hurry. I watch videos on YouTube. Don’t use social media, but I do use Facebook messenger (although I prefer to use Signal with the handful of people I can). I use a Xiaomi phone with custom ad blocking DNS (I’d like to get a Pixel with GrapheneOS someday). I look for an app on F-Droid first, but install it through Google Play if I can’t find what I need there. I use Qwant and DuckDuckGo. I use ReVanced. I do not use a VPN. I think that’s all the relevant information. My question is: how easy do you think it still is for big tech to track me? Are there any suggestions you would have for a person like me that wouldn’t sacrifice too much convenience?
NextDNS has presets to block OS tracking, this is different from just Ads. Any DNS with variable blocklists can use these. There is a windows one, but not sure about Xiaomi.
You dont need google services to use Aurorastore. It works currently.
Also try creating a shelter profile and then disabling the play services using adb in the main one with
adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 APPNAMESyou find commands online.
Google play services spy on everything with privileged permissions (all) as they are system apps. On GrapheneOS you can install them as regular user apps, and they still work.
I recommend Mull from F-droid instead of firefox. Try adding my custom addon collection:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/collections/17446767/Fenix-Addons/