In order to protect your privacy even more efficiently, you need to do something very simple whenever using an online service or a software. Something that most people fail to do is reading the terms of service, also known as a TOS, from companies or developers’ software. This usually will tell you straight up whether they’re spying on you, selling your data, or using it to sell ads. This will solve a lot of problems with people not realizing that some software is actually the opposite of privacy, but they keep using it thinking it enhances their privacy.
Yes, and IMHO a good trick to shortcut that is F-Droid. They spend a lot of resources to do all that cf https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/