This is crazy. I’m in exactly the same situation and have been thinking about getting a mobile plan with a Pixel 8 (where I would install GrapheneOS on) as those are getting cheaper with the Pixel 9 out not.

I honestly think deleting personal social media accounts regularly would be a great privacy measure, as I don’t think most people (myself included) have any clue how much they are identifiable because of their social media activity.

From how they’re presenting themselves on their website, I would also guess their payment methods aren’t private /anonymous at all. It seems like you could even be forced to use the Apple/Google integration to pay for your subscription (which just means you can’t really pay privately).

Also, VPNs that have own apps and don’t allow access via OpenVPN are a red flag. You don’t know what their apps are doing and they don’t give you any reason to trust them either.

No, but as far as I can tell, it’s a private company in the US (which is pretty bad for a VPN). Also, all of its features are closed-source. The encryption seems to be closed source. That should make you question their motives and integrity. And trust them not much more than Google or Facebook. For everything not privacy related, as their virtual cards and in a sense also phone numbers and email addresses (those could be private, but not using this service), this service seems fine.

You’re right that default Android found on nearly all smartphones today is not that much better than iOS. There is the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) however, which means the base of Android is free and open source and therefore allows for lore privacy focused versions of Android to exist such as LineageOS, Graphene OS, Calyx OS or /e/ OS. This isn’t possible at all with Apple’s iOS and one can therefore even claim it to be worse than Android in that sense.

Now I have to imagine you standing in the store scanning ports just to get somewhat usable Wi-Fi :)