This is great, thanks for sharing! You’ve got a few useful feedback points, let me add one more: does a provider have an onion address. This allows decoupling of payment from usage. Not a big thing, but good to know.

I vaguely remember some issues with extensions in ungoogled chromium. Maybe I should give it another shot.

People are free to whore out themselves

Depends on what you mean by “private”. I would not trust it much, but it’s not a bad Chromium based browser when you need one. Use something like LibreWolf for much more privacy out of the box.

An outdoor WiFi access point would help with garden coverage

Okay, thanks! I think I should try it then

I probably don’t know enough about sandboxing in GrapheneOS. So if you do that, you still have to log in with Google account, but Google will be able to only see what you are doing with play store apps? And the rest of data like sensors, file system, other apps, will not be visible to Play Services?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I have Pixel 7, so GrapheneOS is an easy choice. But I have a few paid subscription apps via Play Store, and I don’t want to get rid of them… Maybe I could ditch some, but not all.

Not sure how many services can be hosted in that way and remain useful. But it’s an interesting idea overall! For myself, I could run a Git forge on local PC. Since I’m the only user, and I just keep my scripts there, it is fine not to run 24/7.

I’d love to have that, but such a service has to comply with government regulations and payment systems requirements in order to issue virtual cards that are generally accepted. I can imagine a company that would open source their code, but what benefit would it be for you? You can’t self-host it and you cannot audit their infrastructure to confirm they run exactly the same code they publish… You want trustless finances - go crypto and say goodbye to convenience and wide acceptance.

Otherwise, you have to trust a middleman. And if we are talking about trust, privacy.com looks trustworthy. They have paid plans, so it doesn’t look like selling clients data is their business model. They clearly say they don’t sell users data in their privacy policy, which makes them a potential target for lawsuit if they caught lying. They haven’t been caught on anything nasty. Good enough for me. You do you.

You have taken a lot of useful steps. May I suggest email aliases? Using same email address on many services is too easy to track

I believe most people who care about privacy don’t trust Gemini or Google in general. So it’s not an issue if you already not using Gemini app. It can be uninstalled (at least for now) even without going alternative ROM way