Brave offers the most privacy friendly browsing available by default on both desktop and mobile.

This easily negates much of the privacy invasion efforts of ad networks. Even if they do continue to track you, this hinders their ability to put "personalized" ads in front of you.

If enough people do this, invasive "personalized" ads and associated machinery will eventually reach a tipping point and become non-profitable.

This won't stop advertising but it will force the industry to adopt more sensible, privacy respecting "context sensitive" techniques.

Social media apps are a different story.

I used to be a try-hard. I'm not infosec or a programmer, I'm just a person with a computer. I would install every extension possible that claimed to do something, I encrypted everything, basically following every how-to article willy-nilly and fell down a rabbit-hole[1].

Now I keep things simpler:

- social media has been whiddled down to Fediverse and LinkedIn, phone is degoogled

- I do send many of my important emails encrypted - My browser has minimal extensions installed --- because I learned about fingerprinting

- No cloud, no AI

- Never use public WiFi at McDonald's or hotels

- I've used Linux for the past 18 or 19 years as my daily, but that isn't a magic shield.

In short: didn't get into hardening; some encryption, no cloud; mostly avoiding social media (LinkedIn will soon be deleted).

[1]: https://bbbhltz.codeberg.page/blog/2021/04/the-privacy-secur...

I have nothing to hide so I don't care