Summary: My father, who has over 30 compromised accounts, tells me not to install Ironfox (aka one of the most secure browsers for Android) and F-Droid.
Background: I discovered that my father has a phone with LineageOS and asked if I could use it. He said yes because he no longer used it.
Today I started using it, saw what it was like, and it wasn’t much different from Android.
I was having some trouble putting some songs on that phone, so I asked him for help.
He went to the Google Play Store and installed Files by Google after logging into my account.
My account has parental controls, so that phone had parental controls too.
I was supposed to use that phone maybe to use once or twice a month and see what a phone without Google services was like (which I couldn’t disable now because it had parental controls).
So, after finding out what that phone had become, I tried to do a factory reset, but I couldn’t.
Then (somehow) I managed to convince my parents to remove the parental controls, but my dad started saying, “Don’t be surprised if your information ends up in strange places because you installed browsers from outside the Play Store (in this case, it was Cromite and Ironfox) and for running FTP servers (which I was only using to transfer some music I had on another site).”
Sorry for the long text 😅
My uncle has worked many years in IT and sometimes lectures me on digital privacy and security. But I got a glimpse of his phones and computers, it was disappointing. Bogus security apps and optimizations and a refusal to update Windows. Probably different situation with OP’s father, but quite emphasizes the importance of continuing education.
I bet there is an amalgamation going on there.
People who wants to maximum amount of security might not care as much about privacy, thinking relying on a famous actor which spends a ton on security (and runs ads to say so) give them privacy, typically Google or Meta, while ignoring their interests in using private data for profit.
The other way around some people claim they cherish privacy, which sounds like your uncle, yet can not realistically achieve it by using outdated systems leading to poor security and thus potentially bad privacy.
The 2 go hand in hand yet are different.