Exactly. If you’re not paying, you’re most likely the product being sold.

People always keep forgetting that Google (or Alphabet) is an ad company, that does tech stuff with its 20% time. Everything they do is geared towards delivering more ads more efficiently.

This is why I’ve paid for email for years to Fastmail referral link

Similarly I started paying Kagi for searches, mostly because their results are better than DDG, which I used for years.

And, like the people I know from infosec, my phone is from Apple. They’re the only company who makes you pay through the nose for the hardware and because of that specifically do everything they can not to know anything about you. (One of the reasons why Siri sucks so bad btw)