This seems to be missing some of the most practical reasons to avoid Google. "Government surveillance" isn't something you can escape from so easily and walled

This seems to be missing some of the most practical reasons to avoid Google. "Government surveillance" isn't something you can escape from so easily and walled gardens can be well kept. The arguments I find much more compelling: 1) Service quality (and longevity). If you are paying for a service, it is much more likely to go for years or decades without changing anything. It is more likely that you get a human to help with any problems. Avoiding free services is just common sense for anything beyond entertainment. Google's management has been increasingly derailed over the years. A sane company wouldn't break something like Gmail. I'm not sure how well Gmail will be stewarded over the next decade. 2) Minimising risk. If something goes wrong at Google (bureaucracy, illegal activity, coding error), then the blast radius is huge for someone who uses a lot of Google services. That is just an unwise level of risk to be taking. People with access to my emails shouldn't be storing my accounting data. People with access to my video viewing shouldn't have access to my work documents. My phone custodian shouldn't also be my search provider. Unexpected data cross-contamination or sudden lockout from all these things at once isn't desirable and could be somewhat catastrophic in the worst case.