self hosting is the only way to guarantee logs arent shared.

however it also means that your server address only pulls requests for things YOU look at, not the whole pool of people using the server. imo this is a bad trade off as it would allow the services to track my browsing easily anyway.

personally I would recommend looking at libredirect with a large # of frontend instances selcted & a vpn/tor. these websites normally work without javascript, so assuming you have a privacy focused browser your IP is the only tracking metric they really have. spreading your requests out over different servers whilst using a proxy would make this really difficult to correlate as it would require that mutliple instance operators were malicious & collaborating.

you can use something like smspool.net to verify the account with a one time use #. then google will allow you to link an authenticator app to the account. removing the # from the account afterwards does not remove the TOTP code either.

I got my 7a referbished for 350. the nothing phone is cool IMO but probably not going to have good support rn for nieche stuff. lineage & divest not having working versions for the phone raises red flags personaly.

if you are anti pixel & $500 is in your price range maybe take a look at the fairphone 4?

honestly I would personaly look into a used option just for pricing reasons. I think the 8 offered additional security benefits though. It may be a while until the 9 drops but that would also be an option.

if you want to degoogle the only way to run some apps without unprivileged code (GMS/microG) is to use grapheneos & its sandbox compatibility layer. this is unfortunately only available on the pixels.

I also worry you won’t be able to use some of the customization options that the nothing phone 2 offers with its hardware when using a custom ROM. if thats something u care about.

I have the pixel 7a & have had essentialy no issues with anything for what that’s worth.

session doesnt have perfect forward secrecy. they removed it from signals protocol to make it more easily compatible with their onion routing/crypto network. makes it one of the easiest apps to be “backdoored” if any keys were to be compromised.

there’s a foss flavor on the Fdroid repo that doesnt have any trackers I believe

scrambled exif is really practical & easy to use. it has been a player for a while now where as metadata remover seems newer & possibly less trustworthy/vetted because of it.

it also doesnt seem to add much new functionality from scrambled exif besides viewing data in app.

I personally use image toolbox which allows you to select what specific exif tags you would like to remove. however, I wouldnt put any more trust in its accuracy or comprehensiveness than any other adjacent app as they realistically all probably work very similarly.

if its imperitive you don’t leak any exif data I would recommend checking that in an external & more trusted app anyway. something like aves or a similar gallery that will lay out all all metadata tied to an image.

quite sure this isn’t implemented at the moment unfortunately. I have a similar setup & similar issue but haven’t been able to resolve it.

it may be possibly to set up some kind of dual setup using unified push to receive notifications on both profiles, but I haven’t been able to find a tool to do so & am doubtful after looking at the way unified push works.