You have to trust something at some point. What you trust just depends on your threat model.
No, you can instead acknowledge that you can't trust any of it and behave accordingly. You don't have to settle on trusting something.
Say you don't trust that absorbing any kind of liquid is safe, how do you survive more than a few days? Do you prove it first? Based on what, if you don't trust anything?
Trust is all around us, we constantly choose to trust (or not) things.
Ultimately you have to trust in something or it is literally impossible to function. Even if that trust is only in your own senses. In practical terms you have to trust a lot more to function in society. Maybe a good first pass is to trust in things that most other people trust in, so that if there is a deceiver there will be a lot of other people mad with you and a greater chance of not only punishing the deceiver, but detecting them in the first place. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Don't trust Google Services, that's great. Trust your favourite alternative instead.
Trusting means taking risks, for sure. But there is still trust.
I can live without trusting any communications on my phone to be secure from prying government eyes. I have no clue where you got "anything at all" from, sounds like a strawman.
I know in-law jokes are fun, but this just makes you sound like an evil arsehat. What in the world did they do to you that you had them do this not once but multiple times? /s
I'm assuming you probably meant to word that to read differently
And the answer to their question is that it depends on your threat model and the amount of risk you are willing to accept. There is no such thing as perfect security or a perfectly validated platform. At some point you have to accept good enough and get on with your life.
Bigger issue is privacy with notifications going through Google, right?
It does receive some Firebase messages from Google, but not the type that automatically pops up a notification. Instead these are silent ones that trigger the app to perform a particular action, such as fetching any new Signal messages from Signal's servers.
That has never crossed my mind. Do notifications on Android normally go through Google servers? As in could be spied or data mined on?
I don't think all notifications are push notifications, and those that are would be https encrypted between the host and client, so any e2ee message would have to be decrypted on device before showing a notification, google should not have access to this, but of course it comes back to whether you should trust anything software tells you.