[Android General] Exabyter:
Oswald - I think we have largely similar stances on such things. In my case I will sometimes sway towards the pragmatic over the pedantic when the pedantic involves so many inconveniences that the tech becomes more of a burden than a help to me.

For example, I really don't like the idea of 3rd-parties keeping data pertaining to my daily geographic movements, but I also use several tools and services that by their nature rely on location data which could in some cases end up in the hands of parties I'd rather didn't have access to it. So I have to regularly weigh the apparent cost/benefit of such services and there are certainly some of them which have a high enough value to me that I willingly lower my default "protection level" in order to keep the other benefits of such tools/services.

Certainly microG is an important tool in that toolchest as it has a major disruptive impact on some of the most common ways Google and other parties snoop on users. But some of its imperfections also threaten to keep me from my ultimate goal of carrying a single phone which performs all the tasks I need to accomplish with it without undermining my privacy in a major way. (And ultimately, my freedom and agency as a citizen in a nominally and allegedly "free and democratic society", which is the actual "big picture" problem with privacy incursions in general IMHO)

I have spent several years now, with varying degrees of effort and success, trying to come up with a hardware/software solution to this problem, and I've never reached a point where I'm fully satisfied with the results. The fact that I am still carrying several mobile devices with me everyday is proof enough that I haven't achieved my objective in this regard and it gets tiring. As does all the time spent on venues such as XDA, researching, discussing and keeping-up with all the relevant issues, not to mention the large amount of time spent tinkering with HW/SW in order to keep all the special measures working. (And after we finally get things working more or less the way we want, we are faced with the particularly customized hardware wearing out, becoming unsupported, 3rd-party ROM and other compatible and necessary software being abandoned/deprecated, and so on and so forth.)

Truth to tell I'm a bit bitter about the amount of time/energy I have to spend to achieve something which should have been part of the mobile platforms in the first place. The current de-facto mobile platform duopoly certainly doesn't help matters.

---------- Post added at 03:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:57 PM ----------

Now that I've gotten that philosophical rant out of the way ? ...

So as far as technical specifics:

microG of course is a big help as it either neuters or removes many troublesome anti-privacy vectors. For example, at the present time it does not support Firebase Analytics at all, which means (as far as I can tell) any app that expects to get telemetry on users via Firebase Analytics will not get anything if the app user's device is Gapps-free and using microG instead. (It remains to be seen if adding Firebase Cloud Messaging capability to microG will negate this presumed benefit. Cynics like myself are inclined to think one of Google's key objectives in deprecating Google Cloud Messaging and rolling push notification frameworks into Firebase instead was specifically to undermine the ability of users to avoid/circumvent Firebase Analytics)

XprivacyLUA looks interesting and is on my list to test. I found its predecessor Xprivacy to be an extremely tedious and labor-intensive option so I never seriously pursued it after my initial testing.

There are various tools I find handy to help get a sense of how dangerous certain apps may be to privacy. Here are a few:

AppBrain Ad Detector

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.detector

Addons Detector

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.denper.addonsdetector

Checkey (also on f-droid)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.guardianproject.checkey

Applications Info (also on f-droid)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.majeur.applicationsinfo

Permission Friendly Apps

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.androidsoft.app.permission