You are generally right that most of those proprietary products and platforms track you to different degrees. They are not transparent about how they use it. I can attest that many of have been off all of these for years other than when we are forced by workplaces to use them. You may be like many people who are unaware of the alternatives because they are free and not advertised.
I am aware of alternatives, but I was trying to come up with examples from competing companies that many people use. People don’t seem to be up-in-arms about all SaaS products but just those that are owned by corporations that they have a particular bias against.
But my argument is more that we’ve already given up a lot of our privacy by interacting with today’s technology. ISPs, cellular providers, credit cards, banking, the list goes on and on regarding areas where we have give up privacy for the sake of convenience.
I think you are touching on the aspects of scale (how much data collected) and harm (how it is used against us). Another important aspect is time since the older the data is, the less valuable it is to corporations and governments. Debate between which corporations are better or worse comes down to trust and PR. Some people believe that all publicly traded corporations are structurally incapable of protecting users over profits.
It is frustrating. It is clear that people won't sacrifice convenience, thus they will sacrifice their future. No, a "dystopian future" does not await us, it is already dystopian. But big-tech controlled social media is the only thing that most people understand of "the internet". And the discourse there is limited to the triviliaties of daily life, and then these triviliates are fed into the surveillance-capitalist machine.
