I think that a small company has to treat their users more carefully. Big companies get various kinds of lock-in (depending on the product): inertia, user famil

I think that a small company has to treat their users more carefully. Big companies get various kinds of lock-in (depending on the product): inertia, user familiarity, network effects, and a large percentage of the users that don't do things like put thought into their choices and switch. I think that they will tend to behave better as small companies. Most large companies started off as small companies doing good things. But you should probably accept that if they become dominant players, you will have to jump ship again at some point. I don't know about "paranoia". Google, Facebook, etc. can gather a lot of information and perform very sophisticated analysis on it, and aside from what we know they do with it, they can accidentally leak it, get compromised, or just flat-out get more evil in what they can and will do with it as time goes on.