Or you could just admit to yourself that privacy in the digital age is a fucking unicorn <snip>
mnem
Thats the attitude I take with regard to my Alexa devices, but I do recall that drew a certain amount of criticism and people saying that they wouldn't have a bleeding spy like that in their house.
Google track your phone where ever you go anyway and that is not always a bad thing as it has been useful many a time when people go missing as the Police have been known to make good use of that service to give an idea as to search for them as long as the device is powered, it can be located. Equally, the Police can and I believe do, use it to track the location of known criminals if the circumstances warrant it.
As to back-ups of phones and tablets, there are always going to be situations where even if you sufficient free space on the cloud account, that the back-up cannot be carried out. Phones and tablets these days are not just phones and tablets, they are also the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife, especially as we had a discussion here only a few days ago about how good cameras are these days on mobile phones and for some situations almost as good as a DSLR and for that reason alone, a phone camera will still work very well, even when there is zero service available on the phone network. Another reason certain makers are wrong to give people the impression that in the event of a mishap that they can diddley squat about recovering their photos, sayings its impossible, buy another shiny and keep it backed up.
I also don't really consider them to be an aspirational flagship product at all, just another player in the market, my own phone is Huawei P smart 2019 which is every bit as stylish as a top iPhone, is as slim, rounded sides and corners, sealed case, 6" screen, resolution of 2340 * 1080 (iPhone 11 1792 * 828) and a excellent camera with professional mode, but only cost a fraction of SWMBO's iPhone 11. There is zero need to pay their prices for top flight performance, quality and feature set, your paying loads for their flashy logo, their high profile advertising and their genius bar, which is not something that I suspect many of us would be likely to make use of. Don't get me wrong I'm well aware that there are a lot of people out there would and do. Many of SWMBO's family for instance are not very big and reading an instruction book and would bring their iPhones and iPads to my sons or take a 20mile ride to the nearest Apple Store and their Genius Bar for assistance in sorting things out