That’s not a bubble. AI is a bubble, other people wanting your data will go on until there is cultural and political will to prevent it, and there’s no guarantee we’re moving in the right direction. See the recent situation with chat control: it was postponed, but it will be back; and even when this particular attack is well and truly destroyed, there will be another. Privacy and digital rights are a never-ending fight, but a necessary one for the sake of human rights in general.
Signal allows you to speak confidentially, therefore it is private. It is not, by default, anonymous. Yes, this plus the centralized server mean that potentially dangerous metadata, like relationship maps, can be collected. All indications are this isn’t the case, but that’s not something you can count on.
If you need anonymity, which you probably do at least a bit, use simplex. And yes, having more people using anonymous services like simplex is a good thing for the community as a whole. That said, I’m not going to try to convince all of my friends to use simplex. It’s just too far from the mainstream, missing too many features. Signal is a sufficient compromise for most people, and it’s sufficient for me for most purposes.
It would certainly be preferable to use two devices in this context, but first verify that the apps in question actually use the Play Integrity API, and that you can’t replace them with websites. For myself, I use a Pixel with a custom ROM, and I’ve never had any problems. Of course, it could get worse over time, it depends on the policies of the developers.
Taking your requirements at face value though, iPhone is definitely the correct choice. For the longest time, it was google wants your data but doesn’t care about control, while apple wants control over what you do (to force you to buy their other products) but doesn’t care about your privacy one way or the other. Of course, in the past few years, they’ve both taken some of each other’s worst attributes, but I still think iPhone is marginally better on privacy in stock configuration.
There are definitely ways in which apple is worse: they track your location while your device is powered off, not merely whenever it’s connected to a cell tower or wifi network, and I think they still scan photos uploaded to icloud (but that last point could be out of date, somebody correct me if so). But all that can be worked around if necessary, and in any case it’s not as bad as stock android.
Finally, consider how much has to be tied to your phone at all. Maybe your government apps need to be on the phone, but maybe social media and wikipedia can be primarily used on your laptop, loosening the requirements somewhat. Maybe email can go to your x86 boxes only, even if facebook messenger doesn’t. It depends on your situation.
I think that the (only) relevant factor is whether everyone else knows and wants it. Suppose your mod affected only yourself (so other players wouldn’t know about it) and you played in a way that was mostly reasonable, but providing a little bit more covering fire than should be possible. Your teammates might still have fun while they’re playing, though only if you don’t overdo it; but even then, they probably wouldn’t be too happy to discover your cheating once they’d already finished the map. If you give everyone infinite ammo, and tell them about it then that’s fine, but because they know about it, not because they benefit from it.
For that matter, cheating in a competitive server set up for that purpose can be fun (though it can also be wildly unbalanced, especially if the game is asymmetrical)
Do you know of any zero-knowledge providers that are both (a) trustworthy for my own purposes, and (b) unlikely to go to spam?
Like you said, the incoming messages aren’t encrypted, so “zero-knowledge” is always sort of false advertising. Also, if I have to use some weird client, that isn’t good. I do value convenience, especially for email; chasing diminishing returns just isn’t worthwhile, and if possible I’d like to not use both, as I am now.
Consider if a theme could accomplish what you want: It seems like they all use firefox under the hood, and if all you want is appearance, you shouldn’t need to change your entire browser. Keeping in mind that a smaller fingerprinting pool is less anonymous, if you care about that.
I haven’t actually used any other than librewolf though, so if switching provides any features you care about, go for it.
This is so cool, yet another great advantage of the Netherlands.
Finding previously existing services is a great idea, thanks for the link. Here’s hoping I don’t get too much spam as a result. (but at least I can block individual customers addresses)
To the extent that you still need to use standard apps, consider disabling your advertising ID. EFF has a guide to this at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/how-disable-ad-id-tracking-ios-and-android-and-why-you-should-do-it-now
This won’t stop google of course. You should probably also install a firewall, like other people here have suggested. And keep in mind, disabling features entirely is different from not using them. For example, if location services is turned off, then even google maps doesn’t know your location (in theory anyway), whereas if it is merely unused then google will still check periodically.
Is there a good one for Canada in specific though? As far as I can tell the Orbic only works in the US, and as a result I’m not sure if I can trust the other devices, even if they’re the same ITU region. Would the TP-Link work? The docs suggest it should work in the US as well as Europe.