You have accurately identified a major part of the problem. Many people are unwilling to change their habits, or don’t have the patience to learn new tools.

The other element though is time, many people don’t have the time to stop and learn. Especially when a problem like privacy is a lot less immediate than hunger or healthcare.

What makes you say that?

Small fine tuned models seem to be where the market as a whole is headed. Even the big players like OpenAI/Google/Meta are doing this as a means to optimize infrastructure. The Qwen3 models have been really interesting to work with.

I’m not disputing the technical aspect. But due to these realities I prefer to drastically limit the services I interact with.

SearXNG is nice

Sounds like a great reason not to use their services

“I tried nothing and I’m all out of options!”

Sent you a DM, Interested to hear more about these problems!

I have been offering 1:1 chats on signal to anyone who wants help switching to Linux.

Asking questions in forums and social media is intimidating. I despise the snobbery that often represents this community. I just want to help people regain some control over their digital lives.

There is always a trade-off with privacy and security. It’s totally okay to decide you prefer convenience over privacy.

If you wanted to give it another shot:

• You could use a different 2FA app - I know Bitwarden works well
• You can use a soft phone SMS, bonus that you can send and receive from a computer

Why not just access your financial institutions in a web browser?

Natural language processing makes TTS way more usable for people with reading disabilities. But there are absolutely no good uses of AI.