Random stranger on Reddit mentioned - *The art of frugal hedonism* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216874949
This book is indeed eye opener. Though I am too deep to turn around quickly without crashing I am well on may way and there is many more miles to go. Hoping to take few of my friends with me too.
You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.
And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.
Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.
The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.
Fixed.
(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)
Saying that I think I am already hooked on free and/or easy to search etc etc BS. Basically take my data for convenience and some advanced tech. Honestly feels like addiction.