@AdaraAstin Yet again we have a situation where setting up the phone without a Google account (and without Play store access as a result) prevents a major privacy breach.

Google is just plain too dangerous a company to let into your life if you are a sex worker, a whistleblower, or an activist and also do anything where this information cannot be allowed to leak.

I for one consider both Google and Facebook to be two of the most malicious Internet servers on the planet, basically doxxing and malware sites with official permission to exist. Neither is allowed in my life and I have reason to believe this may have protected me from major problems more than once. There are no Google settings on my phone as there is no Google Play Services.

If you don't have a Google account at all, no future update can turn this sort of linkage on. If you also disable Google Play Services and remove all Gapps, Google has no way to pull you back into the surveillance capitalism fold with a malicious update.

Thankfully, an existing phone can be logged out of Google and the account then closed over a web browser preferably other than chrome but for this job probably any will do. You'll have to get your apps from outside the Play Store of course, and forget thing like in-app payments.

Malicious updates have been served by both Google and Facebook over the years. At one point, Facebook turned on an antifeature that uploaded all your contacts to Meta servers if you used the FB app and were logged in. Now we have a similar action by Google, coming on the heels of trying to silently push an app whose sole purpose is to make sideloading more difficult to existing phones via a Google Play update.

Let's not forget that during Trump's first term, Google Maps got caught saving logs of approximate location to Google servers even if you had location history explicitly turned off. Google at least moved all location history shit to user phones and off their servers after the combination of the J6 geofence warrants and the Dobbs SCOTUS decision to allow states to ban abortion.

With talk that subpeonas to Google for abortion travel data were coming, Google threw in the towel as this was too spicy even for them. When a Fascist Texas prosecutor wanted to investigate a suspected out of state abortion, they tried to get the same info from Flock instead.