I'm not trying to make you guys wrap yourself in tinfoil— almost nobody needs to be as paranoid as I am, and even I am tremendously lazy about opsec these days. The key is *awareness*: to simply be cognizant of what kind of records you're generating as you go about your life, so you can make informed, reasoned judgments about how much of it you can leave hanging out, and what parts of it you'd rather pay an effort-tax to shield from appearing in somebody's (or everybody's) database.

This is why my Phone is Graphene OS, I use VPN, and my computer is linux based.