FWIW, replacing big tech with small tech doesn't really solve the problem unless you're willing to go all the way and sysadmin your own physical on-prem hardwar

FWIW, replacing big tech with small tech doesn't really solve the problem unless you're willing to go all the way and sysadmin your own physical on-prem hardware. In my experience, small tech is even riskier because they have similar technological capabilities as big tech to aggregate data and less oversight. Google, for all its ills, has an incentive to protect user privacy: people stop sending them money if they think Google is letting rando criminals harvest userdata, and governments get really antsy if they can't provide audit records for where the data goes and how it's secured. User trust is a lot more valuable to Google than risking that data, and (while the way Google uses the data can be cringe from time to time) the data itself is extremely secure, relatively speaking. Smaller firms can be bribed by those criminals, or bought by another firm with a different idea of privacy, or they simply go under and it turns out the data was unencrypted this whole time and, oops, the physical hardware storing the data just got auctioned off without a proper scrubbing, or some mid-level engineer had a copy of the whole user database on their laptop, or etc. And governments are worse at chasing the long tail of small firms; the legal process is better tuned to plop Meta and Google's lawyers' asses in the chair of an inquiry board than the lawyers / CEOs / garage-bound owners of a thousand small firms.