Honestly, if I have the choice, I will choose Google to keep my data over Facebook/meta. While they will do the same stuff with it, at least they give me good products in exchange for my personal life. I also think Google is more transparent about how they collect their data and they let you pretty easily opt out of most of the very intrusive stuff. I also trust their security a whole lot more than Meta’s as they are pretty innovative in that space (like with webauthn)
If you want to browse the internet privately/anonymously, then use Tor (but please do not download big files using Tor! It has limited bandwidth and people in countries where thye have heavy censorship rely on Tor to communicate). If you want to hide your activity from your ISP and torrent stuff, then VPNs are absolutely still the way to go. Just make sure you use a reputable one like Mullvad or ProtonVPN
Honestly, if I have the choice, I will choose Google to keep my data over Facebook/meta. While they will do the same stuff with it, at least they give me good products in exchange for my personal life. I also think Google is more transparent about how they collect their data and they let you pretty easily opt out of most of the very intrusive stuff. I also trust their security a whole lot more than Meta’s as they are pretty innovative in that space (like with webauthn)