Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver
Yes, it’s that. If you’d use it as your daily driver, you would notice. I do tech support at work and there’s hardly a month that goes by without a Win 11 machine sitting on my desk that has - miraculously! - fucked-up drivers or other issues after an “update”.
Oh, it “harms democracy”, doesn’t it? How about this headline: social media fuels a genocide by spreading rumors, Myanmar finds. But alas, that was 2017 and only brown people getting harmed in some far-away place, so it’s old news and nothing to hold Facebook accountable for, eh?
I appreciate you taking the time to do this write-up, OP. Unfortunately, I believe it will not do what you hope it does, i.e.: “make you a it more private”.
Think of this in terms of data points Google gets on you. As per the warning on FDroid, they get:
the apps list and system details
That alone is very likely enough to identify you, particularly if you
Let’s say you’re running GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7a and have apps installed for Swiss Rail, Bern public transport, the UBS banking app and Signal. How many people will have this particular setup? I’d wager this would already narrow the pool down to a single-digit number of users, if not “one”, and any additional app off the Play Store will narrow it down even further.
While using your native public IP will give them yet another data point to identify you, so will the use of TOR or a VPN, because, again, only a fraction of Aurora store users will do that.
On the other side of the equation, the only “threat” I can think of is: “Google will know that I use these apps”. Outside of a targeted attack (i.e. Google sending you - specifically you - an update with malicious code injected into the APK), I cannot see any truly harmful scenarios arising from this.
All in all, I don’t think there’s much to be gained here: both the effect (if it works at all) and the threat (if you don’t do anything) seem so miniscule that it’s hardly worth the time to set this up.
Instead, this time is probably spent better on this here:
When possible, use Obtanium or F-Droid instead. F-Droid has built in Tor as well.
The only way not to be tracked by Google is not to get involved with Google. The only way to truly win the game is not to play it.
For years, we’ve been wondering how to increase Signal adoption, when the solution was right in front of our eyes. The Signal Foundation needs to implement a function that on every new install, people have a chance to win free chips.