Lizard How and why, and what are the advantages for our privacy?
The GrapheneOS website explains this in detail here: https://grapheneos.org/features#sandboxed-google-play.
It might sound dramatic to put it this way, but on a phone running the Stock OS, Google has virtually unlimited access to almost everything. On GrapheneOS, they have no special access. Google apps have the same access as other apps, which is pretty limited.
Lizard other8026 I personally keep Google apps in my normal use profile, but have other non-Google profiles.
Are there any benefits of doing it this way rather than having google apps in a user profile?
Convenience. Basically, I am satisfied with how restricted regular apps are.
Lizard So what does this mean for someone like me who has requirements to use the aforementioned google apps and other apps that have known trackers? If I put them in an isolated profile am I going to be giving my data to google even without play services installed? If I use these app in the isolated profile with all three google services installed, what is the end result for my overall privacy level?
These are hard questions to answer. I'm not sure I even can, really, since I don't have any firsthand knowledge about how Google (or others) deal with data. It would make sense that using everything from one profile would make it easier for Google to collect and group data, especially if logged in. Using separate profiles might help, but there are other things to consider, like the setup, whether there's a VPN, etc. It would also be helpful to read this section of the website: https://grapheneos.org/faq#non-hardware-identifiers. So even if using different profiles, an app can still get some information from the phone itself, which would be useful in fingerprinting.
I think the best thing to do is to reduce the data they can get rather than trying to outsmart them by using profiles or other methods.
As I've already pointed out, on GrapheneOS, Google apps have way less access to the phone. This is already a huge win. And I'm not convinced Google gets all that much data from apps anyway. Sure, if there are analytics or a/b testing things going on, Google can get useful data from that, but it's not like they can dig through our photos or read our texts (unless given permission of course).
Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done, though, about devs using Google libraries/services. Best we can do is not use their apps, or try to convince them to change their apps so they respect our privacy more.