This post will be my personal experience about trying to gain back my privacy after years of being privacy unconscious. And foremost I want to apologize for my English, if it isn't perfect, 'cause English is not my first language.
I was already using Linux for the past year. I tried switching to it three times, and only the third time was successful. Also interested in open source I was for quite a long time, but the privacy topic has never really interested me. I was following this stupid statement: «I don't worry about privacy because I have nothing to hide», which I regret now. But last Christmas, I suddenly realized how much data I was giving away to Big Tech (and not only them). I can't perfectly remember what did lead me to that realization. Was it some YouTube video, privacy policy that I suddenly decided to check out or something else, but I immediately started to action.
For the past 6 months I deleted more than 100 accounts. Sometimes it was as easy as to press the button, sometimes I had to email support, and sometimes I literally had to fight for my right to remove the account. Even today there are still 7 accounts left, that I can not delete either because support is ignoring me, or because the process is too slow, or because the service simply does not give the right to remove user account.
JustDeleteMe actually helped me very much with that process, and I've even contributed to the project a few times, so to the other users who'll follow my way the process would be at least a little easier.
Today is a special day, though, because I finally get rid of my Google and Microsoft accounts. I can finally breathe free. My situation is still not perfect, 'cause I still have some proprietary, privacy invasive accounts left, like Steam, Discord, or my banking apps. I can't just immediately drop them, but at least I've reduced the amount of information I left behind.
What's the moral? Welp, it would be so much easier for today's me if yesterday's me had been concerned about privacy in the first place.
Not everything proprietary is inherently bad, but you did more than most ever could. It’s those megacorporations & anything “free” you have to worry the most about.
Steam is a weird one since it is proprietary, & you could lose access to your digital game copies but a) most work if you just download them for long-term storage, b) they provide a decent service with deals & synced saves, c) they are privately-held so they don’t need to chase quarterly profits for shareholders, & d) they have done more for Linux gaming than almost anyone else (even if the selfish goal was to break Microsoft’s shackles & later have a hardware device they could sell you that happens to be mutually beneficial for both sides with so many patches).
Deleting everything Microsoft & Google is very difficult. The former I am locked since too much free software thinks it can sleep in the dragon’s den as GitHub. Google, well good luck finding an employer that isn’t using it in my experience & when it comes to using your own email for instance, there’s like a 90% chance the person on the other end is using a Google or Microsoft email account without encryption to get them the whole message anyhow.