This site and many guides like it are intended to help people avoid mass surveillance rather than targeted surveillance. Confounding the two threat models seems intended to confuse and exasperate people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence_(NSA)
This is of course what an outfit like the STASI or Gestapo would do, isn't it? If you're actually trying to hide from surveillance, the best tactic is to hide in plain sight, maintaining a cover story consisting of bland normal online presence that doesn't draw extra attention.
Of course living in an authoritarian panopticon and having to hide in this manner is an undesirable situation, and the solution is not technological, but rather political in nature. One basic issue is transparency, i.e. the public should be able to see what the intelligence agencies and corporations are up to with their surveillance programs. This is why Snowden's exposure of PRISM, XKEYSCORE, TRAFFICTHIEF, etc. was in the public interest, i.e. legitimate whistleblowing.
Sure some genius might think their model has got me nailed but even when I had a Twitter a decade ago and asked for my data Twitter had my age, gender (details I had in my profile btw) and number of kids I have wrong.
The problem with tech companies is they’re run by people and people are pudding brains who believe in magic. The problem with AI, as Chomsky said, is people will believe it. It’s true because they’ve been believing these other terribly inept systems they built, whether technological or social.
Instead, social/cultural solutions might be the key. If only a few people use these mass surveillance avoiding tools, then yes, they become targets. But if almost everyone uses them and they become ubiquitous, the landscape changes some.
I don't think political solutions are impossible, but if they are then our government is incapable of executing the public will. I think the key to generate this type of change is to tell a very compelling and broad story about why the current situation is unacceptable. Discussing {history lesson} or {personal security risk} doesn't seem to be a strong enough narrative. A very strong narrative can turn public opinion and force action by lawmakers. Over the last 100 years there has been a number of examples of popular opinion becoming so massive that the political system has to do something they clearly did not want to do.
* The draft is now reserved for emergency use only. Previously it was used for Korea and Vietnam, which were more about global power projections than direct threats to the US.
* The role of the US Military is moving away from World Police and limiting itself to more directly protect American interests. Troop deployments are highly scrutinized by the public and impact Presidential approval ratings.
* Cannabis went from the poster child for war-on-drugs to essentially unenforced federally and openly cultivated/traded/consumed in large regions of the country. Rules on Magic Mushrooms, MDMA, and Ketamine are beginning to loosen to.
* The end of COVID lockdowns and mask mandates in the US was largely determined by grassroots actions instead of top-down decisions.
I don't think it really even tries to.
To get past those "using these tools makes you suspicious" phase, you have to convince everyone to both care and to use the tools.
Once they care that much, the political solution is also much more feasible.
The methods of the STASI were extremely crude and different to what is available today. They relied on human informants and collected lots of paper.
The political solution requires a political consensus, and that's unreliable.
Defending your liberty with tools you own requires a social consensus, and that's unreliable.
Both are subject to change over time, thus both need to be worked on and managed.
I feel like I should be putting on my tinfoil hat saying all of that, but the reality is that these systems are less and less throttled by the availability of human brains to process the data the automated surveillance systems collect. We made a mistake in thinking that labor costs could ever be an effective guard rail for these tools.
The important thing to keep in mind - and one that I find most nontechnical people don't realize - is that over time mass surveillance and targeted surveillance trend to being the same thing.
Centuries, or even decades, ago mass surveillance was a dictators dream but merely a fantasy. There was no way to do it, not enough people or time, so it was impossible. You could only do targeted surveillance against selected groups or people.
With current technology these are starting to merge. You can actually spy on everyone all the time and store it for later perusal whenever you need to perform a dragnet search in the future.
We're not there 100% quite yet but every year more activities are online and more bandwidth and storage capacity makes it more and more viable to monitor everything and everyone all the time.
The legal and cultural framework to deal with this does not exist. Laws and mindsets are still focused only on targeted surveillance and cover things like search warrants.