I in fact DID click the links and change the filters on the tool to test the europe sites. Try it yourself next time.

And sorry but no, the Guardian, The Verge, and AP news, etc do not provide the same products. I simply choose to accept the reality we live in and deal with it.

From Europe they’re actually better than the other news sites you list here. Either way, I’m using ad-blocking, DNS filtering, and I do general browsing like this in a separate browser that wipes everything on exit sooo 🤷 saves you from worrying about this stuff or even thinking about it much.

Graphene likes to push the use of user profiles (just called “users” in the OS) but I find that to be a trash experience myself. Instead, you can enable work/personal profiles right within the single user account and keep sandboxed Google Play and the apps requiring it all within the work profile. You can restrict location and other permissions for Google and don’t even need to log it in for it to work. You just need the Island or Insular app to enable profiles.

The Google camera app works perfectly for great photos with the pixel hardware and last I checked it doesn’t even require network access or Goodie Play - except it won’t embed GPS in photos without Google.

As you can probably guess, the amount of data Google gets will really depend on your setup! I like to use NextDNS to further filter connections. (Pihole might be better but it’s more effort.)

Regarding seedvault, you can have it save to a webdav location, Nextcloud, or directly on the phone. If saving on the phone you could just have SyncThing or something similar auto sync the file to another device.

They constantly force you to update or the app won’t work. I was already having issues with Revolut on GrapheneOS so I just closed my account and switched to Wise. The Revolut app was a bloated mess anyway.

I have this but it’s no good for consent-or-pay, unfortunately.