This summary is ment for people who are no IT experts, but still want to keep their privacy with minimal effort and maximal protection.
Findind software that provides high quality functionality and still respects your privacy is very time consuming. I did this and summarize my foundings here.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, ... constantly collect personal information of their users. In the very moment the data has left the user's device they completely lose control over what this data is used for. It can be for improving the services or marketing but also for political influence or other issues. The only way to avoid harrassment of your data is not to give away your data. Hence, here I provide a list with software that truly respects your privacy and is very easy to install and use. More privacy does neither mean more complicated, nor less features.
Software can be open-source or *proprietary. Open source means that the software developers publish the source code (what they have programmed). This makes an application transparent to experts so they can control how the software works in detail. Proprietary means that the software is not transparent and the user has to trust the developers. Do you trust the sugar mountain?
The operating system controls how the hardware components (processor, memory, screen, ...) work together and with you as a user. Therefore a privacy respecting operating system should be the first software to look at. Android, MacOS, Windows and many other operating systems are proprietary and therefore not transparent. An open-source, free and easy to install operating system is /e/. It is based on the open-source part of Android and hence Android APPs can be install and used as usual. Check out if your device is supported or buy a new smart phone with /e/ preinstalled here.
/e/ has a preinstalled app store where you don't need to registet but still can download Android APPs as usual. However, I highly recommend additionally installing the App store F-Droid. It's an APP store that only provides open-source APPs. Most APPs that I will recommend below can be installed via F-Droid.
The YouTube APP tracks a lot of your data. If you want to minimize this you can instead install NewPipe. In this APP you can watch videos, subscribe without registering and also use some YouTube prime functionality, like downloading videos to your device.
TrackerControl is a free and open-source APP that shows you which APPs on your smart phone track you and how they track you. With tracker control you can simply block the tracking and continue using your APPs as normal. It may require some playing aroud, before you find the perfect configuration for your system, but it is self explaining.
/e/ already provides an privacy friendly e-mail APP, but if you want to get even more control, features and settings FairEmail is perfect for you. It is open-source and the most important features are free. Prime features cost 1€.
A messenger let's you share messages, images and videos and it let's you audio- or video-call. Privacy friendly and widely used messengers are Signal and Threema. Signal servers are located in the USA, Threema servers in switzerland. Both are open-source and very privacy oriented. Signal is completely free while Threema costs non-recurring 3,99€.
Browsers are APPs that connect you to the web. Mozilla Firefox is a privacy oriented open-source browser. However, it sends anonymous diagnosic data by default. This can be turned off like this.