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?
Firefoxes strict settings are okay but not perfect, have a look at librewolf for an easy solution, or my Arkenfox softening tool to modify arkenfox to be easy to use.
Did you debloat your xiaomi phone already? May help with some things, but of course not much, but
Facebook messenger is cancer as its unencrypted afaik, so they read everything. Poor you.
An adblocking dns is good, do you have android tracking blocklists, to make xiaomi phones usable? But to be fair, samsung is way worse
Try shelter and isolate all these bad apps and disable them when not needed