IMO, it's not only Big Tech that poses a threat on privacy and freedom. Big Governments are other threat that, IMO, it's much harder to fight against it.
And so monetised has it become that any attempt by government to reign in the pervasive surveillance, it could potentially have a noticeable effect on the employment rate as all those "smartest people on the planet working very hard on getting better click rates" in the big tech surveillance industry are legislatively made redundant. Bad politics.
This would also dry up a fair portion of the ... lobbyist funding ... governments receive.
Plus governments handily use these private enterprises profiting from pervasive surveillance to take the pulse of the citizenry for the purposes of staying in power - the very reason they're in government in the first place.
So, yeah, Government, as they are, are a significant part of the problem from a number of angles.
Taking the U.S. federal government as an example, by my count we've already seen over 60 notable breaches in just this young decade: https://github.com/MattHJensen/US-gov-info-losses. Certainly many others have gone unreported or unnoticed.
Whenever people complain about Big Government I like to remind them that any attempt at regulating industries like Big Tech is decried by the owner class as "Big Government", which is often parroted by conservatives, libertarians, and other pro-business groups.
So is it Big Government when it protects the interests of Big Industry to the detriment of its country's people, or Big Government when it regulates it to protect the interests of the people? They can't both be the same thing, and I would argue what most people call "Big Government" is what they've been told to call it, namely the regulation of corporate interests. Nobody ever calls the consistent erosion of people's individual rights "Big Government".
I've never heard anyone decry "big government" in response to governmental actions that they like, so I don't think it's usually a principled position.
We (the "owner class," parrots, what have you) would argue for the government regulating itself, not the companies. Facebook showing you fursuit ads as a result of your history isn't as big of a problem as the government showing up at your door now that you've shared the wrong idea online. Governments should not be allowed to indiscriminately collect data from (that is, to spy on) it's citizens. Giving the governmemt more power doesn't seem like the right solution here, being that that is exactly what we are trying to limit. Companies should not be unregulated, but more important is that the government itself should be regulated: specifically, minimized in it's powers.
I disagree. Big Government means the government getting into every subject possible. The opposite of this is that you have a government that only enters into essential matters for the well-being of society.
Which has poorly defined boundaries because people disagree on essential.
In practice "Big Government" is used only for PR value. It sometimes seems the more a politician or policy wonk uses it, the more they are actually likely to increase government spending when they are in power.
Most people seem to use "Big Government" to mean they don't like something the government is supporting or regulating, and "Essential Government Function" to mean something they want the government to pay for or regulate.
A void of power never creates a favorable outcome for the common person. If there's room for commercial activity in the area, you can expect all sorts of unethical tactics to eventually surface, like we see in cryptocurrency. In a free-for-all capitalism people will lie and scam and cheat for profit.
So I don't really know what could the government get out of that would make things better.