The tech world does not give you the choice of letting you pay for privacy or pay by invading your privacy. Now, you can nitpick that you can build your own service or host your service, but then the question becomes why is programming/sysadmin knowledge a prerequisite for using your phone?
“Here’s a hypothetical ideal analogy, doesn’t that seem reasonable?” is one of my least-favorite types of arguments in cases where the observable reality is extremely different.
Who cares what it might be like? We can see what it is like.
