If my upvotes/downvotes/flags may be secretly used to profile me in ways I can't know about, and my secret profile might negatively impact my experience on this site, isn't my best option to not participate at all?

In short, with this mechanism I can't trust that doing anything, be it clicking through to an article or flagging one, might negatively classify me. I can't be sure this site isn't trying to trap me somehow.

My advice is to let all of this hand-wringing about such nebulous issues as 'quality' go. It's a fairly decent community here and that's about as good as you could expect from the Internet at large. If you're really worried about what this site has become, simply conclude the 'Arc experiment' and shut it down.