Pixels get verified boot and bootloader relocking for custom roms like grapheneos as well, so you can be sure your device isn’t compromised even with a privacy respecting custom rom. I guess this is what most people refer to… Oh, and Pixels are probably going to get security patches for the kernel as well as the vendor blobs unlike many other vendors…

I’m not English native and I often see Google ads in my language. Many of them are of very low quality and some ads connect to phishing links, weird apps or cover contents. I don’t think Google strictly restrict them…

Though I feel Firefox (and its fork Fennec FDroid) is a lot slower than other browsers based on Chromium like Bromite and Kiwi. I’m using a phone that’s pretty low-end in 2023 standard though. (MSM8974 with 2GB ram running Android 11)

This… While I don’t like how the source code isn’t updated to the public regularly there isn’t anything fishy in Kiwi, we get regular updates and there are some neat features like being able to change the tab switcher UI or use desktop extensions.

Opera was acquired by a chinese consortium back in 2016 or so. IMO opera telemetry isn’t too different from other proprietary browsers like chrome or edge but there were also some controversial decisions on Opera such as not removing a chinese CA cert (wosign?) that was being widely misused etc.