Yes, personally I use DDG more than Google, but we are in our 70ies, so it would be hard to convince the wife (who has been a dev 40 years ago) to change her habits. I am already looking into SearXNG, though.

I changed the user-agent of my browser to “Error: No browser installed”. Can’t be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don’t think it will hurt me today 😆

That was my first thought as well.

Not sure, whether it is relevant for this thread, but my phone (POCO F3) does not get any notifications if Google Play Services has no access to the internet. I scratched my head for a while to find out, why I never got them on mobile data. Not sure, what it does, if you disable the store.