It is against the GDPR.

In the EU this kind of automatic opting-in to marketing/data sharing is against the GDPR as it requires explicit consent from user/customer. I’m in the EU and have those settings but they were both toggled off, as expected.

I’m in the EU and that section in the settings isn’t even there. I guess they aren’t doing it here, for now at least. Probably due to GDPR.

Whatsapp uses the same protocol as signal so MITM is unlikely however there’s no way to know what happens before or after the messages are encrypted/decrypted and sent. They can do that scanning at that stage.

That is different than Signal which (unless they changed something with the profiles thing) was always P2P E2EE. You’re sending encrypted messages directly to the other persons phone, not to a server.

Sender cannot know where the recipient is and using P2P would be resource consuming on all client devices (i.e. everyone who uses Signal) so I guess the messages are routed thru Signal’s servers though messages are encrypted on device with keys that only the messaging parties know (couldn’t find an official diagram for this to confirm).

In a country with good consumer rights, this would be a valid reason to return it and get a replacement or refund: It’s no longer offering functionality that was advertised and that you paid for as part of the purchase price.

In the EU this would probably be a no-brainer.

Wonder how they’d manage that as they both are E2EE.

You won’t get rid of google tracking you on Youtube or Gmail,

For gmail that’s true (one should use something else anyhow). For youtube you can use an alternative frontend like NewPipe to avoid tracking.

If you care about privacy you should use a trustworthy paid email. They even aren’t that expensive. You can get them as low as 1 € / month.

You can basically disable most Google tracking though a good DNS that blocks that traffic.

So only most but not all. Therefore it’s not private if there’s any tracking. Thus a de-googled version is the only option.

Have you checked the source code that they actually respect private dns setting for their tracking? Or otherwise verified that no traffic goes to google tracking servers?

If there’s tracking it’s not private.

This didn’t seem to occur in Windows, but I’m pretty sure the copy process was also slower so guessing it’s some sort of buffer or heat quirk that 'nix didn’t account for in the more generic driver

If the device says it’s a generic storage device (to the system that is) but actually isn’t (based on your description) then it’s 100% devices fault and not a Linux fault.

Just use some other search engine. No tricks needed to get non ai bs results.