Exactly and if you have to use stock android or iOS to get this feature you are agreeing to so much intrusions into privacy that it’s sort of moot.

Of course you can’t use it without being part of a huge tech duopoly so yay and it doesn’t work without googles proprietary messaging app.

Not really necessary people make DNS requests which are pretty easy to track if you know what URL was requested that will be the exact product. This can all be done by man in the middle and monitoring network traffic. But even that is sort of unnecessary. They could very possibly have contracts with ISPs or other network operators some of that is likely just secret and they dont disclose it.

Likely every product any amazon customer ever views. They could potentially even figure out which things you buy. But you can get a pretty clear picture of someone’s personality and interests if you know everything they search for.

They do it all to build up a huge web of interconnected data points. Duckduckgo itself they might take as evidence that someone is trying to hide something. Then the government goes to a FISA court and gets permission to have other tech companies hand over all your data. Its not any one site its the picture that can be gleamed from all the data available across all the sites.

Duckduckgo is not the problem. They are using publicly scrapable information. So for instance if they have fingerprinted your device they see you go to duckduckgo, then they see you access a site about buying guns, it becomes trivial to determine what you searched for. They would not have direct access to what you search on duckduckgo and duckduckgo is not giving them access. They are using various methods to collect data based on habits. You can use literally any service you want and they could do the same thing.

Probably just whatever the public metadata is. metadata is super powerful especially if you have a lot of it. if the email was protonmail to protonmail they will get nothing. If it’s gmail to protonmail they will know that user X is talking to User Y in gmail. They will also have the email header information which is basically just going to be clear text. so they can still ascertain who you know, who you are talking about, and maybe a bit about what the conversation has to do with.

EDIT: so I asked protonmail directly about it and they confirmed its only publicly available information that they can get. For instance they can try and verify if a certain email address exists. However proton told me that they actively watch for this kind of thing and block IPS trying to do this sort of monitoring.

I think this is absolutely doable to problem is you need to have enough users on all the time to make this sort of thing work soa doptionn is important. You could probably piggy back off existing open source projects to get it going.

And yet you can borrow anything from the local library for free and its considered totally fine and not pirating.

Google’s idea of privacy seems to always be we will protect your privacy by having all your data and making sure we are the only ones who can profit off of it. Its not that they care about privacy they care about them having exclusive rights to your data.

Freetube and newpipe for me. However I will say they just don’t work sometimes. So then I just am left with my browser.

It’s very hard to say. Based on your use case I would say either grapheneOS or calyxOS. I personally have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for CalyxOS but technically speaking graphene likely meets your usecase better.