[General Questions and Answers] GalaxyA325G:
I try to put effort into the response so that others can benefit (but nobody ever presses the like button so maybe it's not worth the effort).

For example, when I mentioned I spoof my GPS, I looked up the app I used and linked to it so that you wouldn't have to test a score of apps like I did to find the best one.

That was just off the top of my head where there has to be at least a hundred different privacy things I do on Android to distance me from Google that most people don't bother to do.

I admit, sometimes it feels like we're putting a dozen locks on the front door, but in the end, we LEARN a lot about Android in the process.

A lot of the protection is to protect ourselves from others who don't know how to configure their phone, so they are uploading our private information (like our contacts and home locations) to Google databases.

For example, the typical Android phone when it drives by your front door uploads to google your exact location, your signal strength, your unique BSSID and your SSID... where you'll note in my response above I had to do a half dozen things on my phone and router to prevent that from happening (i.e., just adding "_nomap" doesn't work but most people don't realize that because they don't think about it).

I'm sure there are plenty.

But I have been in MANY situations where there are none.

Take, for example, changing the GSFID... almost nowhere on the net is that described how to do it. Almost nobody does it, but it can be done if you know how.

I really should write a set of privacy tutorials so that everyone can do it but I have to find the time, and this web site doesn't like text tutorials I found out recently. So they make it a PITA in the end to help people. Sigh.

If you look at the links I gave you in my response for contacts, gps spoofing and privacy-aware WhatsApp, you'll get a good start.

A quickie is to not have a contacts.sqlite database, which means you need your own contacts.csv or more likely contacts.vcf file, which you can maintain on the PC if you like (works with Excel for example).

Now that you don't have a contacts.db sqlite database, you need to find the contacts and dialer and mms/sms apps that can suck in their own contacts.vcf file, which I pointed you to in the Simple Mobile Tools suite.

For GPS spoofing, I didn't mention you need to turn "Mock Location" on in the Android Developer Options, but that's what most people already do so I assumed you knew that. Once you turn that on, you can just select the mock location app of your choice (where I suggested one above which isn't perfect but none of them are).

That particular app moves your location every few feet and it gets the altitude and it can easily be stopped and started, etc., but I'd like it if it didn't move just "west by 10 feet every minute" but instead if it would follow a pre-determined route that I could give it. So they need a lot more work to be as good as we'd like them to be.

For What'sApp privacy, look at the two apps I linked to in the prior post as they don't need the contacts.sqlite database to work.

Your WhatsApp should only have an icon in your folders for the people you contact and nothing else, IMHO. That's the best privacy you can get, although WhatsApp does decent hashing on the contacts file when it uploads it to their servers - but still - why give them your entire contacts when you only contact 10 people (or whatever) on WhatsApp. Right?

Funny you mentioned microG since I installed it for the first time yesterday when I was setting up Vanced Youtube based on this thread.

I generally choose apps that don't use GSF but sometimes you have to use a GSF app (e.g., Zoom meetings), and then it's nice to use MicroG instead of Google Services Framework.

I only installed it yesterday so I really don't know how well it will work for me as I didn't even need to install it to install VancedYoutube. You just need it to log into YouTube but I never do that anyway.

In summary, there's probably a hundred things we do to our phones to set up privacy but I'd have to write each one up in detail to help everyone and that's a lot of work.

Especially if almost nobody reads these threads.