One thing I would suspect is they leverage third parties and share your phone number to get back additional known data about you or your interests or other activities which other companies have shared. I think in a way it ends up being a connection point for your data across many places.
Agreed, I meant rather than asking for a back door or making it law, they could make it really difficult for the software vendor that the vendor actually volunteers a back door so they can be freed of the burden of asking permission for a patch and explaining what that patch does and what files it modifies etc..
It passed the test for me... I read up on it and liked it. I put it on a separate IOT wifi network and it's routed over vpn so not exposing my IP address. It works really well and very happy with it.
I read the privacy policy and thought it was pretty decent. And yes, all traffic was encrypted which was good enough for me.
Have you heard about pihole for DNS blocking ? You m might have success when at home on wifi as this would greatly cut down on ads and trackers.
Otherwise, if you think Firefox is too slow to pirate (not sure I understand that, but ok) you can try another browser .. maybe try Brave? Ya, maybe some negative publicity lately, but I'm not sure it bothers me, or perhaps I don't understand what exactly they might be selling of my info..
Pihole. Default block lists