Their products are still solid. Any brand can have issues with their batteries (other companies use the same cells), and I don't see a reason to avoid their non-battery products like cables and chargers.
Transfers are usually pretty quick these days. Sometimes I transfer money from Schwab to Fidelity at night, and it's already available the next morning.
In the USA, a lot of the larger banks and brokerages (and maybe credit unions?) internally use systems like FedNow or RTP, which allow for instant transfers to other banks. It can take a little while if they do extra security checks though.
Small banks are good too. I used to use a fantastic local one called First Republic where every customer had a banker they could call or email if needed. First Republic were acquired by Chase, who wanted some huge amount of money in the account (something like $200k) to get a similar level of service through Chase Private Client. I closed the account.
As long as you use encrypted DNS, like DoH (DNS over HTTPS). Regular DNS is unencrypted, so the ISP can trivially collect data even if you use a custom recursive server (either your own or a public one like Cloudflare, Quad9, etc).
Running a recursor on a VPS then querying it using DoH seems like a reasonable approach to me. I've got an AdGuard Home server on my home network that uses DoH for all upstream DNS queries, but I'm currently just using Quad9 rather than my own recursor.
You really don't need to survey many people to get statistically significant results, assuming your sample is truly random. For a population of 340 million, you only need to randomly sample ~2500 people to get a 95% confidence interval with a 2% margin of error.
A sample of 9000 people would get you closer to a 99%+ confidence interval.
Because of various privacy legislation, and people not wanting Google to track them as much, they stopped syncing the data to Google servers. As someone who's worked at big tech companies, my guess would be that storing so many people's location history was flagged as an issue during a privacy audit.
It's entirely local now. You can enable encrypted backups and back up the data, however you can really only have the data on one device now, and the web version is gone.
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