The author offers a solution that doesn't involve Google, but honestly, the solution is far more fundamental. Technology cannot protect you when your government is trying to push intrusive and oppressive laws.
So -- do follow the author's recommendations, but also vote out those politicians and parties who are trying to push these laws at the local, state, and national level. That should be a coda to every one of these articles.
"Technology cannot protect you when your government is trying to push intrusive and oppressive laws."
Rubbish. The Onion Router (TOR) is specifically built for people trying to evade authoritarian governments with "intrusive and oppressive laws". GPG. E2EE. Technology can't _guarantee_ that an authoritarian government won't sniff you out, but it can at least partially protect you.
"also vote out those politicians and parties who are trying to push these laws at the local, state, and national level."
That's not realistic for a number of reasons.
In the US, almost all politicians want to create a surveillance state -- they just disagree on who they want to target. And lots of voters support Their Side on this.
Putting aside partisanship, voters overwhelmingly support laws targeting Sex Offenders, including mass surveillance ostensibly for hunting down the witches.
But let's say that we magically vote out all of the authoritarians tomorrow -- what about in two years? 10 years? 20 years? One of the issues with this data collection is that it is _forever_. In 20 years, the government can go to Google and ask them what you were doing today, and Google has that because the data lasts _forever_.
So, yes, we should target authoritarian politicians and vote them out. We should also persuade the populace that mass surveillance is always a bad idea. We should avoid companies that are deliberately surveilling us. And finally, we should specifically use technology to protect us from surveillance, because the first three things aren't very realistic.
I didn't notice a simple, practical piece of advice: Leave your phone at home.
It would be inconvenient but if I did something I wanted to keep very private, I would leave my phone on my desk while I did it. A change in my activity or its absence reveals something possibly happened, but at least doesn't spell it out.
So -- do follow the author's recommendations, but also vote out those politicians and parties who are trying to push these laws at the local, state, and national level. That should be a coda to every one of these articles.