Private companies also seek to maximize profits…

The data privacy angle was just editorialized headlines, the CEO statement did not mention it.

I use Dynalist. It’s an outliner, not strictly a to-do app but functions well enough as one. Also useful for notes, brainstorming, project management, or anything where you want text in a tree structure.

I got a notification advertising Minecraft the other day. I’m positive I have all the settings about suggested content turned off. At least you can disable notifications per app, this one was from “Suggested”.

there is a slight trade-off in privacy, as Chrome and Gmail will share URLs with Google to check if they are malicious and temporarily associate this information with your signed-in Google account.

Yeah just a slight trade-off of sending Google every URL you visit.

I fear leaving a laptop in the drawer for a few months and then it crashes when I update it.

Usually you just need to do pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring first. Updates requiring manual intervention are pretty rare.