I think the main intention here is to block the bots. Reddit blocks requests coming from certain IPs associated with VPS and similar commercial providers. VPN services often rent exit servers there. My connection is blocked when it goes through Tailscale exit node hosted on a VPS.

You can use Tor to browse Reddit anonymously, there is even a .onion address

This is great, thanks for sharing! You’ve got a few useful feedback points, let me add one more: does a provider have an onion address. This allows decoupling of payment from usage. Not a big thing, but good to know.

I vaguely remember some issues with extensions in ungoogled chromium. Maybe I should give it another shot.

Depends on what you mean by “private”. I would not trust it much, but it’s not a bad Chromium based browser when you need one. Use something like LibreWolf for much more privacy out of the box.

An outdoor WiFi access point would help with garden coverage

I’d love to have that, but such a service has to comply with government regulations and payment systems requirements in order to issue virtual cards that are generally accepted. I can imagine a company that would open source their code, but what benefit would it be for you? You can’t self-host it and you cannot audit their infrastructure to confirm they run exactly the same code they publish… You want trustless finances - go crypto and say goodbye to convenience and wide acceptance.

Otherwise, you have to trust a middleman. And if we are talking about trust, privacy.com looks trustworthy. They have paid plans, so it doesn’t look like selling clients data is their business model. They clearly say they don’t sell users data in their privacy policy, which makes them a potential target for lawsuit if they caught lying. They haven’t been caught on anything nasty. Good enough for me. You do you.

You have taken a lot of useful steps. May I suggest email aliases? Using same email address on many services is too easy to track

I believe most people who care about privacy don’t trust Gemini or Google in general. So it’s not an issue if you already not using Gemini app. It can be uninstalled (at least for now) even without going alternative ROM way