Some people get into self hosting just because they're interested in the mechanics of it, but many people I think got inducted by the fact that for example, Facebook or snapchat make it so difficult to save your own pictures or migrate to another service, or the possibility that Google is reading all of your emails, etc. Others may have been radicalized by a specific event, such as a service provider closing up business and therefore you lose your data.
For me, it was Spore com. I loved Spore, from the time I got it for my 10th birthday to maybe the age of 16 or 17 I poured hundreds or probably thousands of hours into this game. As I got older I became less invested in the gameplay and more invested in the creative aspect of it. I designed some badass creatures and spaceships that I was really proud of. I had a whole line of Spaceships that all served different roles in my head cannon, with different races of aliens following different themes.
EA/Maxis/whoever runs Spore now purged all of them from spore.com, and now they're gone. Years of my childhood essentially put into a locked box and the key thrown away. For me it was like losing a scrapbook in a fire. What right did they have?
So I ask, What radicalized you?
For me it was the story about a dad who got his entire Google account shut down because a picture got flagged as CP. The dad took Google to court and it was proven that the pictures were taken to send to the pediatrician and were objectively not CP. Google refused to reinstate the account even after he was proven innocent.
After recently having a daughter of my own, I don't want to run the risk of losing all my photos and everything I have in Google, all because Google can't admit they were wrong.
Where was this story when people were flipping over Apple doing this? Not that it exonerates Apple, just that it shows Google has been doing this dance for a long time.
A major difference here is Apple was checking hashes of images against known materials and never transmitted/inspected the material themselves.
A picture sent to a pediatrician wouldn't match a hash. So the claim here is that Google is manually inspecting all images, or at best, all images flagged by some back-end image inspection system, which seems a bit far-fetched to me. Also messages sent to a medical provider should be sent via a secure message gateway or encrypted mail at the least.
This story is either missing a lot of key information or was fabricated.
Here's an article about it from the NYT, was a simple search. It shouldn't be that surprising that big tech will find a way to screw over their users eventually.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html