Well the long-term solution is to control your infrastructure completely. Digital sovereignty.

And to use technology in a way that meets your expectations, that means putting trust into other people.

The long-term solution is to have a community to develop and maintain tooling that meets your needs. If you are dependent on untrusted infrastructure, it's just going to be one battle after another, as your adversary just keeps trying to fuck you.

The actual privacy and security education is very mathematical or technical on hardware or software principles. It is the responsibility of engineers to make those considerations.

In your case most technical engineers are adversarial. This is why you have to even consider this problem.

I haven't read it myself, but I've seen Extreme Privacy by Michael Bazzell recommended on this topic before.

Don't use technology. Retreat into the woods and wage a protracted insurgency against the state

https://anonymousplanet.net/

There is an instructional video titled One Battle After Another.

There is no definitive set of rules for "privacy".

You have to know what you are trying to hide and who you are trying to hide it from.

You cannot hide that you are a communist/socialist/leftist/whatever. Hiding your affiliation to these is antithetical to the goals. You have to get together (in real life, not on the internet) with other like-minded people to accomplish the goals of these causes.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the best source of privacy information that I've known. The organization has lawyers that sometimes provide pro-bono legal representation in cases related to internet stuff. They have lots of educational material and guides on the website.

Go to the link at the bottom, scroll to the bottom of the page. There are buttons that says like "I am a (abortion patient | protestor | academic | journalist | lgbt youth)". Click whichever button is most relevant to you and it will give you a list of privacy suggestions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation

https://ssd.eff.org/

I won't get into a great debate about this but I will tell you that 90% of what I see as advice to online privacy is absolute snake oil.

To put it bluntly, privacy online is almost completely dead and the myriad of ways each person is tracked via cookies, IP, logins, MAC, browser fingerprinting, behavioral telemetry and so on on are so pervasive and integrated into the internet at this point that anyone who needs to know who you are will know who you are

You can certainly take steps to be a little more obfuscated but the simple analogy is if you take a walk down the street and buy a bagel with cash anyone can see you are (describes you) and that you went to that shop and bought a bagel and then walked back into that apartment/home. If you are doing that every single day then anyone watching you has a pretty good idea that the person of your description lives in that apartment/home and buys a bagels at that shop. The internet is no different and is, in fact, worse, because everyone is the watcher and they are all listening to your conversations with the shop keeper and standing outside your doorway and looking over your shoulder every second of every moment and all talking to each other. Trying to whisper in your conversations isn't going to help you nor is putting on a medical mask and baseball cap. They still see the person leaving their apartment/home and going to the bagel shop every day to buy that bagel.

EDIT: My point isn't to discourage people to practice OPSEC and implement some basic privacy methods into their internet use. My goal is to discourage anyone here from thinking that stuff if genuinely hiding you from the corpos and feds. Don't trick yourself into thinking you are untraceable with some basic OPSEC. Don't get caught, comrades.

I've been in a similar mindset to you and for me I found it was very easy to get overly conspiratorial, paranoid and afraid of the state of things. So just keep in mind to do things that are proportional and healthy, ok?

That aside, the most important thing to think about is to have a threat model. You can't defend yourself until you know what you are trying to defend yourself against.

For example, "encrypt your hard drives" is only practical advice if your threat model includes authorities coming to your house, taking your computer, and reading what's on it.

You need to define which data you want to be private from whom. Then you can look at how they're getting it, and only then can you take measures to stop them.

Feel free to reply with your threat model and I could maybe give actionable advice.

You need to define your threat profile and expectations.

If you want to hide from Google and Facebook advertising, then using a VPN and a privacy-focused browser will get you basically everything you really need.

Likewise, hiding from local law enforcement, buying drugs online or whatever, TOR really gives you what you need. And really a good no-logs VPN is probably already enough.

If you want to hide from the CIA or NSA, then you need to not use the internet.