I’m pissed with Google for basically creating monopolies, and with new legislation like DMA, hopefully open standards allow me to just use something better and still collaborate with Google users.
We all have loci of control, and maybe I’m selfish for thinking this way, but educated people who care about privacy will automatically switch when it is convenient. The fact is, Google controls a large portion of the Internet, and most people simply aren’t willing to avoid Google and the zucc to the same extent as you and I. Without changes to the defaults, these services will always remain fringe applications used by tiny percentages of the digital population, and while that’s okay, you can mitigate this for yourself (and your children) to an extent.
On a little bit of a sidenote here (I’ll remove if it’s against the rules), most of the world does suck in one way or another. The US is overrun by megacorporations, the global south by cronies and government tyrrany (also megacorporations?), and the rest of the world seems to be losing money.
That in no way means you and I can’t do anything to improve our own lives. Is it harder? Sure, but it’s considerably easier than making a social change, and while the world does need people to propagate social movements, it’s often exponentially more mentally demanding to do that then to fix the solution for yourself and your dependents.
Despite all of this, I’ve seen people go from calling me a neckbeard for using signal to becoming way more paranoid than they realistically need to be (they spent 10 minutes looking up big tech privacy violations). That gives me just a (very) small amount of hope that things might change in the future, whether it’s laws like the DMA and GDPR or whether it’s just general awareness (less confident regarding the latter).