My IT teacher from high school put a major emphasis on online privacy.

He thinks the internet is a major threat to individual freedom and while it brings benefits, the negative effects are too big for him.

While I don’t agree with the last statement, I do think privacy is very much under attack nowadays and while I am not very concerned what other people and corporations know about me, I still care about privacy simply because I have the right to do so and because if I don’t pay attention, a dozen different trackers will know what I have done without me granting permission.

Corporations basically take advantage of people and give nothing in return and that is bad imo.

then all other players must be cutting a lot of corners

I mean, I’m pretty sure other phone companies use child labor to harvest the raw materials necessary to produce their devices, so yeah, they are screwing over tons of people.

The default Fairphone OS has Google and a bunch of other trackers.

For a good privacy friendly Fairphone, you should get the Murena Fairphone (they preinstalled DeGoogled /e/OS)

You can just use the website (install it as a PWA) and then just connect your device with Tor VPN