Unfortunately you have to create an account and provide phone number to WhatsApp for communication with your family.

You can disable cloud backups, set auto destruct message timers, not use metaAI and not put any extra info, but not much else to mitigate. At least message or voice content is end to end encrypted, but Meta sure collects a lot of metadata.

Also if you are on grapheneos, you can set up contact scopes, to only include people you communicate with on the service.

Nope, installed koreader on it for extra features, like reading RSS news, playing chess and more. Never created an account, just get books from project Gutenberg or Anna’s archive.

Not surprising for them to drop MV2, I expected it to happen even sooner, you would have to go out of your way to support MV2 extensions on chromium based browsers, and I do not see a reason for Microsoft to do that.

I get the impression that people want MV2 primarily for better ad/script blocking, but maybe the more secure and efficient way to go is to have built in adblocking. Firefox recently integrated adblock-rust, but you have to enable it in about:config and add filters manually, it seems very experimental and barebones at this moment compared to how it works in brave, for which it was written originally. It is probable some firefox forks expanded on this feature.

Just use it offline bro if you can. I do not really use LLMs much lately so IDK, but I prefer gemma4 though. Deepseek distilled to 7 or 8b will probably work fine with mid range relatively recent hardware.