It dissipates righteous indignation by making sure that people feel the satisfaction and the release of “doing something” (and thus not act any more forcefully) whilst said “something” is the least impactful thing imaginable.

It ultimately makes those who would do more do less instead.

Not only would that solve this little problem, it would reduce Google’s power and remove one’s data from the claws of US authorities (were the Patriot and Cloud acts let them mass track everybody using a Google product).

Just make sure you chose a non-US Linux phone.

Most online petitions are nothing more than a way to safely (for those targeted and for those amongst the authorities who support them even against the public interest) dissipate the common people’s righteous indignation, by making them feel like they “did something” whilst said something is just about the least impactful thing imaginable.

(Some official ones, for example those mandating parliamentary sessions on the subject if they reach a certain threshold, might not be so, though its unclear as it really depends on the legislation around it allowing politicians to just ignore it at will)

This bullshit will require a lot more than adding your name into a list on some corner of the web in some legal jurisdiction where they’re free to sell your private information.

Ideally the thing should be broken into a “Camera captures images and makes it available in an open format” side and an “Application for Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/whatever reads said open format data and shows it to the use/records it in local hardware”, so that if one’s chosen provider for one of the sides enshittifies you can easily replace it, but I can understand the tendency to make and launch the whole thing fully integrated as one non-interoperable big bundle from a single provider given that in practice “do it and they’ll come” projects that just provide data in an open format in the expectation that other people will make the software that uses it, almost always fail.