$179 is way too much for a phone that sends all of your login information for different pages and services to Motorola's servers in plaintext...
in fact, even if you flash it, you'll want google play services, and it then still sends all the info to google again.
So unless you can live without gapps (some apps won't even work without it nowadays, due to calls to the proprietary API), you're a little screwed.. well thats unless you wanna port FirefoxOS to it or something.
Ignore and carry on.
You can disable a good part of it manually, thanksfully. Still, he sure has a point.. its not like if that data wasn't sent. It fucking is.
By default it does none of those things. You have to hit "yes" to enable the location reporting which defaults to off but which you are asked to enable the first time you add a Google account.
The rest isn't done at all unless you are using the Google services to sync that data. Which is only an option if you've added a Google account.
know anybody that does?
It sucks for some apps, like bank-specific mobile banking apps, that aren't possible to get outside of Play store.