Private companies also seek to maximize profits…

So they found less propaganda on TikTok. Good to know!

I got a notification advertising Minecraft the other day. I’m positive I have all the settings about suggested content turned off. At least you can disable notifications per app, this one was from “Suggested”.

No opinion on AdGuard, but there are several options for ad blocking DoH:

• https://ahadns.com/
• https://blahdns.com/
• https://controld.com/free-dns
• https://libredns.gr/
• https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/
• https://rethinkdns.com/

there is a slight trade-off in privacy, as Chrome and Gmail will share URLs with Google to check if they are malicious and temporarily associate this information with your signed-in Google account.

Yeah just a slight trade-off of sending Google every URL you visit.

I fear leaving a laptop in the drawer for a few months and then it crashes when I update it.

Usually you just need to do pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring first. Updates requiring manual intervention are pretty rare.