and since Advanced Protection blocks unknown apps, you won’t be able to side-load

Ah, there it is. It's a good decision while they're being repeatedly investigated for being anti-competitive.

'Advanced Protection also prevents you from disabling ... Google Play Protect', I feel safer already.

Most features here let Google scan and evaluate what you do on the web, messages, and apps.

They say it helps security, but of course it assures those features are on letting them suck in more data about the person.

A company like Google doesn't do something out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it for profit

If it’s made by google, I’m going to go with “probably not.”

I’ve been checking out the localhost tracking vulnerability and there’s something I can’t work out: it’s not even a terribly obscure or convoluted exploit, especially Yandex’s implementation that’s been chugging for more than 8 years over basic HTTP. It’s just a glaring sandboxing workaround that’s been exclusive to this OS for more than a decade.

No matter how many ways I look at it, I haven’t come up with a reasonable explanation for how it was ignored, by demonstrably capable engineers, unless Google itself had use for it in the first place. And that fits a pattern of selective competence in information security that they just can’t seem to quit.

In short it’s the data collection backdoors they leave themselves that defeat the otherwise top-tier security of their consumer offerings, and it’s why I’ll probably never trust anything they’ve touched until I’ve taken it apart and put it back together again.

So no, you probably shouldn’t use it. Trusting the privacy or security claims of any adtech company will always be a mistake.