has anyone used session?

I agree with you fully on that front. I just think we should demand more than just some settings options.

yeah I’ve seen this research, and again I’m in no way defending Apple’s user abuse. You say that Apple spies much more identifiers which is true as per paper but is true only while using device without touching Play services. It’s measuring spying activity only in idle/startup mode of operation. I kinda doubt Google doesn’t use WiFi MAC address of phone for social/location mining. Paper doesn’t mention anything about what kind of spying happens when you start using your phone as a typical user would: mail, web, maps, YT.

I saw that. I think its unreasonable to argue in favor of Google despite Apple being disastrous. The only privacy conscious option I see for smartphone usage is LineageOS without Gapps + FDroid or /e/ for less tech savvy people. Lots of tracking happens trough WiFi/BT mapping and that means you have to get rid of problematic pieces of SW stack at a pretty low level: Gapps and ditching iPhone completley.

Do you know that spying happens exactly trough Google services? You cannot have any expectation of privacy with Google services installed. Google has monopolized spying on Android by restricting APIs that can be used to spy on users (wifi/bt scans, filesystem, background processing).

Google’s Android is at least open-source and there are some vendors that try to optimize it for better privacy.

That is misleading. There are no large vendors that offer such devices. Only option AFAIK is /e/ foundation with its 3rd party installs, but they are by no means an established player.

how is it any better than iPhone if it comes with all Google spyware? Spying in Android is done with proprietary Google services apps which Fairphone has installed. IIRC Google forces manufacturers to offer either Google-laden devices or use something else. They have contractual obligation to not offer both options like Google stuff vs. LineageOS w/o Google stuff. That contract was also part of antimonopoly case against Google in EU but I’m nut sure how it turned out in the end

heh all that talk about word blacklist and this gets trough. Automatic censorship is truly a stupid idea.

There are certainly options to buy more privacy respecting phones even for non-tech savvy people. Take for example the Fairphone. Its Android is pretty much stripped of the worst stuff and overall (while not perfect) probably better than an Apple phone

That is not really correct because it comes with all the normal spyware included. Fairphone is about being green not privacy conscious. You could flash some custom ROM on it but then we are again in the tech savy area. But it is true that you can buy Fairphone (among other phones) from /e/ foundation.