Edited to clarify.
Things to consider: How much of your data would you be comfortable letting Lemmy sell vs Reddit? If Zuck treated users better, would you be more accepting of Meta monetizing your data every way possible? When it comes to using something for free (tangible or intangible) do you accept a company selling your personal information if their practices align with what you feel is fair?
I seek to min-max the subjective value retrieved from the service/product vs. the amount of data given to the data vultures, while taking alternatives into account.
Some examples, including the ones from the OP:
So when it comes to privacy I try to keep myself safe/private but without going full zealot about it.
There are meta search engines that will show you results from google without associati g you in any way with said search, searxng for example
I wasn’t aware of SearXNG. It looks cool; if I can get Google results without Google data vulturing, I’m happy. Thanks for the rec!
You could also try Startpage which is literally just Google search without tracking if SearXNG doesn’t work for you.