> by encrypting your communications and ending your reliance on proprietary services.
Well, unfortunately, you can't encrypt your location and pretty much every mobile phone is sending detailed GPS, accelerometer, barometer, WiFi, and other sensor data back to the mothership multiple times an hour.
You fundamentally cannot have location privacy with cell service. A cell tower will provide service to a limited physical region. When someone dials your number, the telecomm company needs to know which tower to route your call to. If telecomms didn't know where you were then cell service would not work. Sure, WiFi/GPS can provide more detailed location information and are commonly sent into the cloud and this is a problem too.
Google Play Services is not easy to rip out, and it installs itself as a "better" location service provider for the device, meaning that app requests for location go through it. And it can and does upload "anonymized"[1] data of all these types constantly as part of its normal operations. You can withhold consent to uploading "anonymized" data by paying careful attention to click-through agreements[2] and explicitly turning off "high location accuracy"[3] in your Android settings.
[1] The technical details of how this data are anonymized, nor how it is analyzed and used to "improve products" are not public.
[2] The implications of each click-through agreement are, as usual, non-obvious.
[3] The name of this mechanism keeps changing and it is harder and harder to find and disable.
Within a few minutes I can deactivate Google Play Services on an Android phone using ADB. The universal android debloater available on Github makes it easier. The better solution is a custom OS forked from Android, but what is possible depends on the device.
Disabling Google Play Services isn't the problem. The problem is that a huge number of apps will not run without Google Play Services, because Google puts all their fun/useful APIs and toolkits in it so they can be closed-source.
Yes if you are dependent on Google or Google integrated apps, simply deactivating it on a standard OS may not be a fit option for you. Graphene has built shims to make most apps work, but you might have a problem with another OS. I deleted my Google account many years ago and have not had Google Play on my devices since then. I use very few proprietary apps anyways.
Well, unfortunately, you can't encrypt your location and pretty much every mobile phone is sending detailed GPS, accelerometer, barometer, WiFi, and other sensor data back to the mothership multiple times an hour.