Installing Apps from the Google Play Store - would this lead to Google tracking me? Can I avoid this?

Recently installed Fairphone OpenOS, and much as I would like to only use open source apps, there’s a few that I can’t go without, such as WhatsApp and my banking apps. I have a vague idea of how much Google collects your data and would like to avoid that happening as much as possible.

Would downloading the Google Play Store allow this to happen? Are there ways of getting round this?

PS Here’s a photo of a concise Private Eye article (paragraph?) on the subject.