How can I escape Google?

Two initial points to start:

1. Location tracking

   If you don't want to be location-tracked, you cannot carry a smart phone, or flip phone with a cell provider contract.

   The phone you carry on high frequency intervals is communicating with cell phone towers, constantly, 24/7, establishing its triangulated position with them and confirming its ability to receive calls and to transmit data. The service provider records this location history and may share it in some aggregated or sampled form with third parties that you have never heard of (along with some you have).

   The phone of course has a number of hardware components the IDs for which are included in these communications and are unique, so individual physical phones have individual histories. In terms of associating those histories with specific humans, all providers make it possible for third parties to have business arrangements wherein it becomes possible to associate those IDs with specific customer account data- name, snail mail address, etc.

   There are numerous third parties that had previously built out historical databases of names, including spelling variants, and snail mail addresses, and turn those into whole family histories- parents, grandparents, siblings, children- along with neighbors and other coarse location associations. Some of these are participating in more granular cell-based location tracking arrangements.

   Third parties are sometimes not supposed to use this data for certain purposes, or to save it for an extended period of time, and in general they can be trusted only to completely fail to not use this data or to not save it for an extended period. From time to time these failures and the resulting exposures are egregious enough that they make the news.

   (Note that if you also leave wifi on, the same is happening with hot spot providers, who are under even less obligation to not do whatever they want with the observation that MAC address x:y:z comes into range of hotspot 12345 every Friday night at 11pm, etc.)

2. Google

   If in particular you want to not leave a data footprint with google, you cannot own or use an Android product. The Android OS is in frequent communications with Google servers to convey various sorts of telemetry. This happens independently of whether you are using any Google-branded apps.

   I have not studied what happens if you use a third party OS on Android hardware. They are all to a degree based on the upstream Android source. My scepticism is that all traces of interactions with Android server infrastructure, under all edge cases and so forth, had been excised, would be high.

   If you do not want to leave a data footprint with Google then you also cannot visit any websites, because nearly all of them use Google Analytics.

So, with that background, the specific questions:

Q: if I factory reset my phone, will Google recognize me when I next use it? I presume so, as they have at least a fingerprint of hardware/installed apps/whatever.

A: Yes. Phones have unique hardware identifiers. Those identifiers are not changed with a factory reset.

Q: In any case, if I use the same SIM card, I image they will tie me to the device.

A: There is a difference between the cell service provider- for whom the SIM card services as a unique identifier- and Google- which has its own identity infrastructure based on Gmail accounts. Google servers receiving network traffic that originated from the device then comes to Google from the cell provider egress are able in many cases, though not all, to associate that traffic with a unique account at a cell provider. But Google's identity management is not based on the SIM.

Q: would a new 'phone help? If I did not get a new SIM/'phone number?

A new phone, in order to use the cell network, needs to be associated with an account, and that account has to have an identifiable owner- either a person with a name, SSN and address, or a business with a name, TIN, and address. So as long as you have a SIM tied to an account in your name with a cell provider, your use of whatever physical phone with that SIM will associate telemetry data with that account.

Q: what if I get both a new SIM card/phone number and a new 'phone number simultaneously?

See above. One has to think about the concept of "account" in a different way.

Only LinkedIn - and am happy to use that in private mode, via a VPN.

Neither of these things matters if you are authenticating with LinkedIn. All that's happening in "private" mode is that the permanent cookie LinkedIn wants to save with your browser doesn't get saved. But as long as you authenticate- surprise- they know it's you!

Similarly, VPN makes little difference. Sure, the IP address you seem to be coming from may be the VPN provider's, but many VPN setups are broken and the real IPs are easily leaked. There are also numerous tells in searches and communications on LinkedIn that can inform regarding the location of the account. LinkedIn has relationships with third parties with whom some of this data, at coarse levels of granularity, is shared.

I am willing to make some effort, but not extremis.

This is the most important point to follow up on. What exactly is the concern with location and other kinds of tracking?

At the end of the day, ad targeting, while unpleasant, in the US at least is largely innocuous.

There are plenty of places around the world where tracking of various kinds is not innocuous, and where there isn't even the pretence to various forms of privacy. But usually the concerns in those cases center more directly on various authorities and less on specific companies.

If you want to escape Google as much as possible, you should first avoid their products and services. Here are some tips and tricks. Not sufficient, but should help.

• Avoid GMail
• Avoid using Android (e.g. you can use a second-hand Windows Phone instead)
• Avoid installing any app from the Google Play store and even having an account on the Play store. Sometimes, you really have to look at the very tiny strings at the bottom of webpages to find alternate download links that are not on the Play store. I remember this was the case for Firefox.
• Choose a bank that does not ask you to download an app on the Play store for their secure login.

• Use web search engines that use their own index. There are few as most engines are metasearch engines, but there are some. YaCy.net is a peer to peer search engine; data are not centralized but are stored in a peer to peer network. Amongst centralized engines with their own index are Yandex.com (Russian), Baidu (Chinese), Bing (Microsoft) and partly Qwant.com (French), which is also a metasearch engine at the current time.

  Is Yippy.com developing its own index? Maybe. It is described as a metasearch engine. However, most results seem to have been cached and coming from Yippy index.

• Be careful with all online services are many are using components from Google. Prefer standalones when you can, even if paid.

• Be aware that the vast majority of time planning software (especially online services, but also several standalone with synchronization features) rely on Google Agenda, or use it to synchronize with it. Simply don't use them or avoid the synchronization.
• On PC, edit your host file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc so that your browser will search those sites locally instead of calling them.

127.0.0.1 googletagmanager.com 127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 data.coremetrics.com 127.0.0.1 criteo.net 127.0.0.1 criteo.com

You should also avoid fonts loaded from Google. Many websites use them. There are many more sites to add. You can visit this for a long list: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

• Try to remember the address of websites and enter them directly in the address bar instead of searching them in Google.
• For translations, you can use deepl.com.
• For videos, remember that YouTube is owned by Google. Some alternatives are Framatube (based on Peertube), Vimeo, Wistia, Dailymotion, Metacafe and more.
• Favor buying a standalone executable (or using a free one) when you can, because online services, including those from startups often use a lot of services from Google, especially Analytics. When you cannot, use web apps that are open source and that you can run locally on an xampp/mampp/lampp server (Apache+PHP+MariaDB). For alternative online services, a useful list is on https://framasoft.org. Their website is available in English and French. Many standalone software are reasonably priced. By buying them you help small companies to survive and offer alternatives to Google products and services.
• Lastly, be aware that the Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corporation which is a "for profit" company and that search engines like Google pay to be the default search engine in Firefox. As an alternative to Thunderbird from Mozilla there are several standalone mail clients like TheBAT!, Chaos Intellect, EverDesk, Claws. Each has its pro and cons.