I felt this way about iPhone. My compromise was to only connect using a VPN. The goal wasn’t to keep my traffic private — it was so that I could have complete

I felt this way about iPhone. My compromise was to only connect using a VPN. The goal wasn’t to keep my traffic private — it was so that I could have complete visibility and control over what the iPhone was talking to. The idea was that my iPhone could be as nefarious as it wanted to be — it could never talk to anyone I didn’t want it to talk to because iptables stopped it, or something. The project didn’t pan out, but I did end up using pihole a lot which felt like a good compromise. I also discovered that iOS and cell carriers have a some kind of partnership to silently send each other text messages containing lots of unique looking identifiers, which was fun (REG-RESP?v=3&r=...&n=+555994321&s=FB87CD658A...etc). I used a niche IOT carrier for a while that showed me the complete SMS logs, including all these messages being sent multiple times a day. I’m sure there’s some banal engineering reason for it but it’s not exactly heartening to find “secret” text messages being snuck out, by the dozen.