I totally agree with you and this is the opportunity to call on the tech savy who are here. There’s a lot of people like OP, like me, drenched in frustration, because we realize we are the product, but we don’t have the strength and the knowledge to emancipate ourself from this position of semilliterate. Yes, you could say: just study, but when one works the time, having some organized free time is the Neverland. I think it’d be something memorable, that will endure times if people of good fill could put together some sort of wikipedia that explains simply how to come back to be a user, or even better an explorer and not just a product.
I know there’s something like but I do not have the skills to install it. I do have a proton account, I use DDG, mozilla firefox and I tend to use f-droid for every app, before going to Google play to download what I need.
I began to pay for the Internet services or make donations (small ones) to organizations who are respectful toward the person and bring/offer interesting contents to the net (Intercept.
But what misses is the will to communicate and literate people like us that suffer the Internet without having to tools to take back our right to be just a curious person who want to wander through the world rather than into a mega mall center.