If we're doing these kind of olympics, give me the medal right now: I have no smartphone, no TV, use Gentoo GNU/Linux with the least freedesktopware and the most suckless and UNIX/Plan 9 philosophy compliant programs possible, program lots of my own tools, use qutebrower (will switch to Nyxt soon) with Tor/no JS when appropriate. What I could do to get further: glibc → musl, recursive DNS resolver → encrypted DNS (but I prefer not having to trust the server), ISP router → ISP router in bridge mode or something else with a router under OpenWRT.
The only useful "truth" I can give on the subject is that true technological freedom can only be had by users who understands
completely the systems used. Which is why I'm not too fond of the FSF's mission of spoonfeeding people instead of giving them power: you just replace their master by a benevolent one, which has always been a "solution" for the masses, but the exceptional individuals should follow a different path.
Both startpage and firefox are compromised; startpage since it was bought a few years ago.
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/browsers.html is a useful resource; the guy is retarded on other topics, so beware.