[Android General] Oswald Boelcke:
Privacy Measures and Considerations

You might be wondering why I post this and actually so far on top of this thread. As you can read above, I recognise maximum privacy as my centre of gravity (COG) i.e. everything needs to be done to defend the COG. Or in other words, without all the steps below, I wouldn’t be able to install and use some of the applications i.e. tools to decrease the drainage of my battery. The following measures and considerations are therefore the prerequisite to continue further.

Prevent Google's and other applications from "calling home” by controlling access to WiFi, mobile data (including roaming), or VPN through “AFWall+ (Donation)” and control effectiveness through Network Log.

EDIT (2016-11-18): Google is no longer an issue as I'm "GApps free" for some days, and I'm extremely happy with the performance of my system. If you are interested in more information please search this thread for "GApps free".

Limit all unnecessary use of services and broadcast receivers not only in support of privacy but also “to save fuel” e.g. by “MyAndroidTools”. As an example, here’s a link to one of my posts in a different thread, where I showed how to manipulate some broadcast receivers used by “Google Play Services” in order to decrease its wakelocks.

If using MM+ control of all permissions in the ROM settings granted to the installed applications including system applications. In the ROM privacy settings, by default don’t allow any application including system applications access to your private data; just grant this permission on a strict case-by-case policy if absolutely necessary. Check in the advanced privacy settings if the granted permissions correspond with your objectives. Use AppOpsXposed for additional implementations (refer to post #7).

XPrivacy - The ultimate, yet easy to use, privacy manager by @M66B. Actually, I deem XPrivacy to be the most powerful tool on an Android device to protect privacy. XPrivacy can only run on devices with an installed Xposed framework. XPrivacy doesn’t control permissions an application gets granted but is able to spoof all data that are made available to an application or are requested by it. The advantage of this method is that the application itself “believes” it’s correctly functioning whereas denial of a requested permission quite often leads to a force closure of the application.

XPrivacy isn’t only extremely powerful but also highly complex albeit easily to use from my point of view if you familiarised yourself sufficiently; however, this takes a bit of time but it’s the effort worth. And M66B has provided a very detailed user manual and FAQ tutorial.

And just to reiterate: Without the mentioned measures, I would personally never have installed some applications; to name them I leave it with your imaginations.

Remark: If someone decides to go for one or all of the mentioned applications please consider to use the donation versions (if available) or to donate to the developers in order to support them and the further development!

EDIT (2017-06-11): Due to the (hopefully only temporarily) non-availability of Xposed for Nougat, I had to terminate the utilisation of XPrivacy i.e. to try to use my brain more intensively. It's a pity.

If interested in Privacy, these two posts might be interesting to you: Post #64 and post #66.