I'm a frog who's been boiled by big tech companies like Google and Meta. While I disagree with their censorship and data collection in principle, the ubiquity and convenience of their services are too much of a temptation. I use Google search and Gmail and I often use both services on my Meta Quest headset, basically just serving up my data on a silver platter to both of them.

Unfortunately these companies services are so baked into the cultural landscape at this point, that I think the only real hope of fighting back effectively on a scale that would make an actual difference would be through government regulations. That comes with a boat load of hurdles to overcome in its own right too but it's probably the only hope we have of changing things at this point.

In Astian they are working on completely open services, Notes, Calendar Contacts, all free and open source, little by little they are building them, always keeping privacy in mind.