...have they ever tried anything like that?

I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery and a Hosts file to block as much Web advertising and tracking as possible.
This makes the leaks obvious: one random item I browsed will follow me around in ads on several sites.

Of course, Amazon knows exactly what I want, and Google knows I go to (legal) cannabis dispensaries on my vacations, but I can live with that.

(sorry)

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin, and I also use the MVPS Hosts file... both on my home and work computers.
I stopped trusting Google when they were bundling Google Desktop with new computers.

You failed reading comprehension.

I've done everything from on-site support to large-scale Windows XP image design and deployment, but now -- due to age and disability -- I work from home, answering Help Desk calls for one of the worst companies to work for in America.Our call queue times range from 30 minutes to over an hour, partly because the team gets virtually no training: some of them can take 45 minutes to track down drivers and install a printer. (I have provided some training for them in the past, but tamping down the calls in the queue always takes precedence over actually improving how we respond to the calls).

As you can imagine, the users aren't the main source of frustration. Our IT department is easily the dumbest on God's gray Earth, and the stupid flows downhill from the very top. The business model seems to be "make a change that breaks tens of thousands of computers -- or hundreds of thousands of user profiles -- and let the Help Desk fix them one at a time as they call in." We basically work for Dilbert's PHB, and our company is circling the drain while we divest locations and cut costs by laying off staff and ditching M$ Office for GSuite... both of which are making the call queues even worse.

I cope by reminding myself that I do a good job, and take care of the callers I get. I also realize that I'm sitting in my jammies in a recliner, half-watching movies on a 55" TV while I work, that I only have to do one thing at a time, that I have almost no responsibilities that extend beyond any phone call I take, and that most of the end users' jobs are much worse than mine (hence our placement on the aforementioned list).
When I was younger, coming up, I would never have survived here. Now, I look at it as a means to a worthwhile end: my wife makes much better money, and we could survive quite comfortably on only her salary... but we enjoy new cars and cruises, and this Dilbertian hell is our conduit to such things. Besides, in our company of 50,000+ employees, I sometimes get to feel like a minor celebrity: several times per week, someone recognizes my voice and says "Thank God I got you!"

SNL predicted this idea, and its flaws, decades ago:
https://youtu.be/F42qmFHNM-M

No issues, no files deleted. (I have image backups of both machines anyway).

I make all my income from M$FAIL anyway, so I can't say this is bad news...

...and in several static bags.

Bob Woodward's Fear and The Chapo Guide to Revolution.

...to live in one of the areas Verizon chose to string fiber, hoping to compete with Comcast (and replace their POTS wiring in the process).
At first, we didn't want to connect to their fiber. We were getting 120 Mbps down and 15 Mbps upstream from Comcast, and we had ended our home phone service with Verizon when we took Comcast's bundle.
Then, we started having reliability problems with Comcast, just as my increasing workload from home was hampered by their slow upload speeds.

So, I went with 150 Mbps Fios, and I had the installer run the fiber right through the wall into our home so I could power everything with a large UPS. It solved our reliability and bandwidth issues handily. A few years later, we went with "gigabit" -- actually, about 850-900 Mbps in both directions. It's been very reliable, and we have more bandwidth for our home than many of the 200- to 300-bed nursing homes I support from my home office.

If Google had anything to do with the 900 Mbps pipeline running right into my office, then I thank them.

You beat me to it.

I've heard from this scumbag twice today, a dozen times so far this week. Fines and prison are too good for him. He should be keelhauled.

...I replaced my Lumia 1520 with a Nexus 6p, and recently replaced that with a Samsung Note 8, but the best phone camera I ever had was in the Lumia. We compare photos taken with it to those we took alter, and the Lumia captured much better images.

I liked WIndows Phone just fine -- and I make my living supporting Windows, so learning that OS was a good fit -- but I did not enjoy the two-year forced vacation from available apps. When I bought the Lumia, I lost access to SiriusXM, Square credit card payments, and other applications I had been using daily. I spent almost two years trying to find replacements with mixed results, and finally solved all the problems by ordering a Nexus 6P from Google.

M$ MapPoint and Streets & Trips were excellent packages for creating far more detailed, customized maps and travel plans than you can create in Google Maps.
Sure, they had their drawbacks -- chief among them being the static nature of their mapping information -- but they did things that Google never replaced.

Someone should create a front-end like that for Google Maps data, so we could tailor up-to-date mapping data to meet our actual needs.