I always cared about privacy, but I never really looked into it too much.
I am always reading and watching stuff about technology, so I also always saw news about all the tracking and data collecting all the tech giants do.
So when I got my first smartphone (iPhone 3G, 2nd iPhone that hit the market) I made used a seperate account on it, and continued that when I switched to Android with a Galaxy S2. created a google account thats just for the phone.
The next thing that made me look more and more into data privacy: windows 10.
I started using PCs with window 3.11 
then I used win95, 98SE, XP and Win7. I never switched to 8 or 8.1
I started looking into win10 more in detail about 3 years ago as support for win7 was going to end early 2020. instead of switching to win10 I made the jump to Linux when my win7 PC stopped working in April 2020.
So now my current Phone (a rooted LG G5) started to show its age and I need to get a new phone in the next 12 month or so (luckily I dont use it much, it spends most of its time on my desk at home)
the preinstalled Android on new phones is not an option for me as I dont want all the tracking and advertising stuff on it. So I started to look into custom ROMs some guy on a Linux Discord server mentioned CalyxOS and GrapheneOS as alternatives so I started looking into those.
So yeah when I discovered those two Phone OSes I also started to look more seriously into privacy and security of my digital devices and data. My next phone will be a pixel with GrapheneOS. The only Google Service I use is google search, so I dont think will miss anything with GrapheneOS on my Phone.