We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
Not much. I consider Google to be one of the least offensive players in the category. Besides, using another provider to handle your data exposes it to new risks. Is the other provider actually more privacy preserving? How's their security track record? Do they have a sustainable business model that complies with providing better privacy? Is there anything preventing them to make a 180? Are you paying for it? Who are their investors? Etc. 🤔
Self hosting using open source software is a real alternative but it's far from trivial and therefore not available to most but the more knowledgable technical people. It requires significant work even when automation is used and security can be botched fairly easily. If the data leaks, privacy evaporates. I run a lot of self hosted services.