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The only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases. If you add so much random data then there's no way Google can pick up anything useful.

I think the other tactic to defeat Google is to click on EVERY SINGLE AD you see. It will destroy their ad tracking capabilities and it will also destroy their business since they won't be able to tell what is a good click and what isn't. I've started doing this and I don't think there's anything else that can get them to stop actively violating our privacy.

Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse. Otherwise I will render myself useless to your algorithms by changing my behavior so that algorithms won't be able to make sense of it.

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I pay for my Gmail account, but there is still no way for me to disable this harvesting as far as I can tell.

As for the ad tracking bit, there is an extension called AdNauseam that google has repeatedly banned on the chrome store, but it essentially does what you said - register a click on most ads while simultaneously blocking the ads from rendering.

> Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse.

https://gsuite.google.com/

Isn't there a 'not google' solution? Real question.

Also I'm thinking/wanting the same for my phone. (hardware and service). Is there a method for public owned cell phone service (not expecting it to exist, but as a feasibility question - regardless of current obstacles)?

Yes. There have been a few "linux phone" projects, including the ubuntu phone. I too want an open phone onto which I can install a variety of operating systems and would pay serious money for such a device. Sadly, no such product exists atm.

If anyone is listening: I could not care less about instagram or reddit's app. Forget the app store ecosystem junk. Just give me a phone that can make calls and runs a basic web browser. I'd like an alarm clock, and a map/navigation service might be nice, but those aren't deal breakers.

Librem 5? [0]

[0]: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

> The only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases.

The only real solution is to delete your Google account(s), avoid using Google services entirely, and firewall off any access from your machines to Google servers.

You can't escape Google. I think there's been several articles talking about how deeply embedded they are.

You can. Its just that it requires more effort than most are willing to make

It depends on what you mean by "escape Google". You can certainly stop your machines from talking to Google servers, and you can certainly not use Google services. You can even use Android without Google hearing a peep from your device. That all takes work, though.

You can't do much about Google's real-world spying, though, such as their use of credit/debit card usage and so forth.

It's impossible to entirely avoid Google's infrastructure and tracking

But it's possible to avoid the vast majority of it.

You can turn off ad personalization here:

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

But that doesn't turn off the data collection associated with it.

Many people talk about how terrible personalized ads are, so it seems like it's still a win?

What does it mean if they don't even bother to turn it off?

Also I'm not sure re how effective is filling up gmail with fake emails and fake clicks. Is it?

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