Decentralized Web ftw. I run my own email server (although it's a serious pain) and am about to move off Twitter as well since I've been depending on it too heavily for my news. There's almost no creative or entertainment value to Twitter or social networking anymore... it's all political postings and a vast majority of it, quite tribal. Better off just running an RSS server off my cloud and keeping up my news through there. Honestly, to nuke any of those services... most people are better off without them in their lives, as the only real "net" usage is as a data collection service
I haven't had a Facebook in years. They could give two ****s about privacy. None of this is at all news... I remember when they added some privacy setting, then nuked it later on during an update... it dumped a lot of people's information onto the public-facing side of FB and exposed their data to Google cache. Was there any real pushback? Nope... people will continue their social media addiction.
Honestly, no site, no matter how well run or what perfect nuns are in charge of it can be 100% trusted for data security. Way too easy to break into them. Old PHP installs, SQL injection loopholes, lack of updated security, etc... all it takes is one little misstep and ****--the false sense of privacy is gone. I don't mind so much if it's things I intentionally in my footprint... kind of part of living at this point, everything we do is pretty much documented and recorded in some fashion. But we should be paying attention to how much we depend on tech... for example, maybe not everything should be done through tech. Some things are better to maybe deliver by hand, like particularly private details, etc... even some govt business probably gets handled this way, as digital proxies are too tasty to hackers.
Google does track quite a bit through Android. I remember when I flew from MD to TX... looked in my location history and it showed up that I took a flight, what time, etc... there's a rumor also that YT employees are using search histories as well to track certain user's postings and they flag videos/demonetize accordingly in order to clean up their service so that it fits their agenda... but yeah... that's the inevitable future, and it's their private service, so not exactly illegal... same with app permissions. People don't care what they accept, they just hit "OK"... so not exactly FB/YT/Google's fault for creating the product if people are using it without doing any sort of research into what they're actually contributing to those services...