Or to stop putting so much trust in them, go back to "using them for communication with other people directly," and assume they're being evil, because if they're not at the OS level, than some app on them is.

I know they're convenient, I've had a smartphone for years, and have in the past 6 months or so gone back to a flip phone, in which the most interesting thing on it is a halfway complete contacts list and some regularly pruned text message threads (regularly pruned because whatever KaiOS uses for a SMS database gets slow if you don't od that).