It's worse than you think.

There are popular third-party libraries, used by apps, offering whatever functionality.

Those third-party libraries do deals with whoever, to include into the library whatever code it is the whoever wants to get out onto a ton of phones.

I worked for a company in Germany, who wanted to get some Bluetooth base station detection functionality out into phones, so they could track people.

Company put Bluetooth base stations into a bunch of locations, and then paid a major third-party library to include their code.

Bingo. One week later, millions of phones being tracked.

When you install an app, you are in fact installing God knows what from shady friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, who's got money.

Do not install commercial apps. Only install open source apps. Anything else, you're going to be abused, whether you know it or not.

> Do not install commercial apps.

This advice is about as practical as "go live in a cave". At some point, you have to decide whether avoiding the privacy harm limits your ability to function, and sadly, that is increasingly the case.

I live in a cave :-)

I guess I'm an oldhead millenial or whatever, but I thought this was standard procedure among "computer savvy" people post-Snowden.

Crazy I work with Zoomers that install seemingly every dumb retail app so they can get a dollar off a Big Mac or whatever.

There's no reason for a "McDonalds App" to be on anyone's phone. I can wait a few minutes in line, thanks.

Stay away from Samsung. Their default apps (which you often can't uninstall or disable) collect massive amounts of data. The default Samsung keyboard that came installed with an old Galaxy I had was logging every single letter I typed in every app and sending it to a third party whose privacy policy said it was being used for marketing research, to determine my intelligence, education level, habits, attitude, etc.

I would _guess_ that the systemic solution to this problem is one of those whole device VPNs that doesn't choose to hide your location but rather blocks access to ad and tracker networks. I actually have DDG's Privacy Pro VPN <https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy-pro/vpn...> but my life experience has been that it breaks more things than it helps but I guess it's time to at least try it