I have a very low value lenovo tablet that my provider was giving away essentially for free (for worthless loyalty points I think). its BL cannot be unlocked, it has a special bootloader that does not implement the standard unlock commands.

Other than that, I have to admit I don’t often deal with cheap phones, because my experience was that not even LOS supports a lot them. Maybe that’s changed though.

that’s true, but at least try to buy one that’s not extremely locked down, or unnecessarily convoluted to unlock. that instantly rules out all samsungs, for both of these reasons and for destroying phones when sent for repair to an official service

if with cell phones you mean the non-smart, dumb phones then I can agree. however if you buy the cheapest of smartphones, what you’ll get is even more datamining than usual, which you may be even unable go remove because it’s bootloader cannot be unlocked.
but I would say don’t cheap out on tech generally, because you’ll get extremely weak security and nonexistent respect towards you as a customer.

smartphones is a dirty business. don’t support the bad actors with your many, and then long term with your data

I was going to argue that your account is publicly viewable, but I realized that you may still be right. This depends on their definition of what is a user.

Same with semi-public. May even be used for anything that is not public but they don’t like it.

I liked Opt Out a lot, but in recent years it has quite few episodes. It’s main topic is privacy and related technologies, in every episode they have a guest related to the current topic.