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It's gone. Computers will never again be as exciting as they were in the early 00's, because every new advancement now comes with an infringement, a "gotcha", a sacrifice of your privacy, and a subscription to cap it off. Computers used to feel personal, they felt empowering, they felt like they were yours, and they were a gateway to a million little worlds created by people of all sorts. Now they feel like corporate advertising platforms that are just a gateway to other corporate advertising platforms.
Until you install Linux.
Or any free software really.
I dunno I have done a lot of work to cleanse my home of all of that. I have a pi hole for DNS blocking, I use Firefox with AdBlock on both desktop and mobile, I choose to not use ad riddled apps like TikTok or Instagram (fuck Facebook). I have a VPN which I use for most everything. My home is pretty ad and corporate free. As it should be. Granted I'm pretty tech savvy so none of this was hard for me but I could see my mom having problems.
I've done all of that except for pi hole, and that's just because NextDNS seems to be doing the job, although they probably sell my information too. I really should set Pi Hole up, especially since I already have a Raspberry Pi running all the time for my 3d Printer, running OctoPrint, and Klipper. I'll need to test and see if it can run all 3 at once. Unfortunately that doesn't really negate what I said. Every new exciting technology is rife with spyware, and the old Internet, while not gone, is certainly buried under a massive pile of corporate garbage. Google, Bing, DDG, hell, even Kagi have a hell of a time finding little useful websites built because of passion, instead of profit now.
Definitely agree with the Google and Bing, hell I have a better time getting answers to stuff from ChatGPT than Google these days.