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?
My goal is to reduce the information collected about me (increase my privacy) as much as possible and at the same time keep as much of my convenience as possible. I’m not sure how much of an effect this has, but I never used any of the Xiaomi bloatware apps, because when you first open any of them you have to agree to their terms & conditions and when I tap disagree the apps just close (even the calculator, for example). Piped sounds like an interesting thing I should look into, I keep seeing it being mentioned everywhere. But I would assume that if there is a way to login to my account to get all my subscriptions and recommendations the privacy aspect will still be heavily compromised.
Havent personally created an account with piped since I like to limit accounts where ever possible but I believe you create an account with the piped instance that you choose so you dont login to your google account at all. You’ll have to do a google takeout iirc inorder to get a copy of your youtube subscription which you can then import.