The issue isn't, and was never in these cases, that some private information is stored on said company's servers. The issue is that they advertise and promise privacy but break that contract.

While I agree that people should generally be well informed about these topics at this point. The reality is that not everyone is. And even then, there are many people (probably most) that don't know of viable alternatives. And even with self-hosting, even if the will is there not everyone has the skillset or the means (buying hardware, or a place to run it).

The bottom line is that for many people moving away from cloud hosted docs isn't a straightforward prospect.

The united States circumvents your rights to privacy by buying bulk data from data brokers. Those data brokers buy that data from any and every little app on google play store. Something as inocculus as a Bible app is selling your location and meta data to Israel where they sift through the data.

This also let's them bypass and get more data on you than the goverment is allowed to collect on you personally. Because its a private buisness they can collect and sell everything. The fact that some of these companies operate in Israel gives them even more ability to abuse your rights. There's a good reason why every major tech company employs someone from unit 8200 or is directly partnered with them.

Unless you run the hardware, and install your own software you are fucked. And even then your open source whatever probably has a backdoor on its dependency for a dependency in the dependency.

This is why if your camera sends data to an outside source, we just won’t use it.

Yup.

Writing a thing right now. It's all pen and paper until I'm ready to publish

Their users are goods, respect devalues the goods

The global data brokerage industry is worth well over $500bn now. There are 8.3 billion people in the world.

Google don't broker data, but they collect more than everyone else. If data were a stock, data brokers would be the +$500bn industry, while Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon collect far more and HODL while living off the "dividends" of advertising, or more lately AI.

The cloud was always "someone else's computer", now someone else is using that data - and you clicked "agree" to let them.

They offered free access to a website/service, and then in the fine print said you offered free access to your data. They hid two transactions into one, to try and prevent a proper assessment of value exchange, and then tried to make out that it was one transaction after the fact.

Also whatever you type into your phone's keyboard regardless of actually posting what you typed, unless you specifically go out of the way to get one that doesn't log every key press like Google's does.

Run degoogled android/GrapheneOS and don't buy anything with a processor and wireless connectivity that doesn't strictly need them to function