Yes and yes.

Sure, probably they won’t use it for bad purposes.
But there’s nothing saying they won’t use them in any way they see fit.
Maybe they could find a way to find monetize without disclosing them and anonymized, like statistics or with the update in their policy about training their models with whatever information they can get.
Maybe you have an ad blocker and AdSense can’t build a profile from you, but the google already know what sites you were interested enough to make an account and could try to advertise in other ways.

And then the biggest issue: there’s no mention of encryption, so who knows how they store them and where. Could an attacker read them? How are google employees prevented from reading them?

Doesn’t Lastpass have a data breach every two months or so? I migrated last year after hearing of the second one I knew about

Same with bitwarden, I recently made my wife change from google because I don’t trust how they could be managing that kind of data.

Exactly, is like asking if one should use light years to measure time, they come from time but measure distance.
On parallel note programming languages come from human languages but are meant to express CPU instructions rather than complex ideas and knowledge.

Same story as you, afraid of evil corporations, wanting to take more control over my data, so I changed to a pixel 7 pro with GraphenOS.

If you’re wondering how buying a phone from Google helps in this you can read the answer in here https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/2989-pixel-phone-vs-samsung-or-others

only Pixels that support alternate OS and allowing them full use/access to all the hardware security features.

I think you can use this one https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
I’m not sure if there’s any difference when you select what type of request is.

Yes, it’s a small instance I’m only intending to use it myself, maybe some other friends later.
I’m doing it in a VPS with 1 core, 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD (it’s the smallest one).

The only problem I had was because the documentation is a bit outdated, after fixing a single configuration everything has been smooth, I can easily subscribe to any community from any other instance and I can interact no problem.

I think each instance has a copy of the posts and comments.
For example this post in my instance is https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/post/834
But the original one is https://lemmy.one/post/22814
And then in the instance the community is hosted is https://lemmy.ml/post/1159362

You can see the ids are different, so if lemmy.one goes down each instance already has a copy (except the images).
What will probably fail are the interactions, the original instance won’t have the new comments and votes. I’m not sure how it works after it comes back online.

AFAIK, yes, the answer to have control on which instances are blocked is to run your own instance, that’s actually what I did.

For a way to search the number of instances that block certain instance, I don’t think there’s something like that yet.

Let me clean my backlog of unfinished projects (now less with reddit API soon to be dead), learn rust and kotlin to start helping :)