I mean, at this point I find very difficult to believe that people willingly putting their entire life in free Google accounts don’t know that they’re basically ads meat anyway. The outrage makes no sense.
Without going to whole hog and hosting my own infrastructure, what are some good alternatives?
This is absolutely true. Some of us were fine with the trade off in the beginning, because of how useful the services were when linked together. Google didn’t start off with everything linked like it is now. This unification of all their services with no walls or filters has been an ongoing development for more than a decade. I remember having to be on a waiting list to even get a GMail account after getting an invite from someone I knew. I’ve been around using google services since then. Back when Gmail and the calender weren’t separate apps. When YouTube wasn’t linked to Gmail or a Google account the way it is now. The landscape has changed drastically.