If it has not been regularly audited there is really no reason to trust a vpn provider. Wait until they have some proof they do what they say.

I don’t think that’s very effective these days. There are so many sources of publicly available information for sites to verify against that this attempt at “poisoning the well”, so to speak, would be drowned out.

Micro G is the worst option as it requires privileged access to your phone. This is the same major privacy issue with the regular Play Store. The only real difference is your shifting trust from Google to Micro G but, you shouldn’t be trusting any third party with that type of access.

Aurora is a decent option as it allows you access to the Play Store without needing to actually install the Google Play Client.

I would say sandboxed Google Play is the best option. You get full access to the play store while still having the protections of a sandboxed app.

A lot of people will offer f-droid as an alternative but it also comes with some big issues. I’ll quote privacy guides here

Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards.

GrapheneOS and Techlore both have solid communities to use to learn about privacy but, there is a ton of intermingling between them and Privacy Guides so you may not like it.

r/privacy is a bit more casual but its mods are terrible and there is a ton of disinformation to sift through.

I think easyoptouts is worth it ($20/quarter). It has like a 70% success rate which will decrease a ton of grunt work for you. There are a lot (well north of 150+) of these data sites to try and manage.

Just because you remove data once does not mean it won’t be put back on the site later which means you need to make a habit of constantly rechecking the sites if you chose to do it yourself.

I would also recommend signing up to have Google alert you when your name comes up in searches. This will make it easy to remove them from Google and let you know what you still have to remove.

I would just caution you to make sure the changes you make to Mullvad don’t change its fingerprint otherwise its kind of moot to use it over a privacy configured version of Firefox.

https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/

You can at least self host this option. Still a lot of the same privacy issues any type of tracking software is going to have.

Sorry if I am misunderstanding what you need.

The most private way to buy Monero would be using https://haveno.exchange/ (no KYC, transactions over Tor)

In terms of wallets I think Feather or Cake Wallet is the way to go.

Its a bit odd to see an employee of a company that has always had a terrible privacy policy now be suddenly alarmed.

If I’m not mistaken the big missing privacy feature vs privacy.com is that you are still required to provide your real name and other accurate details as part of the transaction process.

For the past 5ish years I had google WiFi pucks (gen 1, ac1200). 4 pucks, one as the router 3 as APs. 3/4 pucks were wired.

Switched over to using a NanoPi R4S (4GB version) as my router and 2x ZyXEL NWA50AX Pros for my APs. The cost for this is actually right around OPs budget, maybe a bit over.

The biggest improvements, in terms of speed for me, are devices that are WiFi 6 capable now getting much better wireless speeds (not super surprising), some going from around 200mbps to about 600mbps.

To be clear there there are over 30 devices on my network spread over 2000 sqft so I am a bit reluctant to reduce everything to a couple of speed tests when there are other factors involved.

Interesting. When I upgraded from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6 it was a significant upgrade but there are a ton of other factors that play into what actual speeds a user may get.

I was more just interested in getting more details about OPs needs as OP basically only provided a budget, which makes it a bit difficult to give advice.

It might be helpful to specify your network needs. The system you linked is a WiFi 5 system. That’s 10+ year old technology.

What kind of speeds are you looking for? Will your access points be wired or wireless?