There is no transaction , it is called crowd sourcing. You're working for Instagram, Facebook and Co for free,in exchange of a "useful" service. You are wilingly giving up personal informations for free. The customers are the advertisers, you are the "user".
And what exactly is the poster saying? That they have a contract with Facebook whereby the poster gets to use Instagram in consideration of the quantifiable amount that Facebook earns from selling any and all data that the poster gives them?
What the poster said is pretty straight-forward, if you can't understand it then the concept is either beyond you, or you don't want to understand it. You don't have to agree with what the poster is saying, but so far you haven't voiced disagreement, you've only projected ignorance (real or fake) over what the poster actually said by continually asking for clarifications. If you want to form an argument, then by all means go ahead, but none of your posts thus far are good examples of how to do that.
And to be frank, I'm not sure if I can read stuff like:
> That they have a contract with Facebook whereby the poster gets to use Instagram in consideration of the quantifiable amount that Facebook earns from selling any and all data that the poster gives them?
in any way that gives you the benefit of any doubt. I mean c'mon. The poster said that there was an "unconventional transaction" happening. Since when does a "transaction" imply such a contract? It comes across as you purposely being obtuse either because you enjoy trolling or due to some OCD-like need to be "right" on the Internet. If neither of those are true, then I apologize, but would suggest that you reflect on how you are coming across to others.
May I recommend Fastmail? Only sent them one support request of sorts, which was more of an alert that they were letting too much spam through. Got a detailed reply and the customer support rep even tweaked my spam score threashold settings. All in all a class act.
I'll definitely check them out. Picking a new email provider is really hard, reliability is key. And to me gmail used to represent the ultimate reliability, but no more.
In my experience over the last 7 years they've been rock solid, no lost emails that I can discern, only 2 or so short incidents when they were down for a little while for whatever reason. Storage reliability might not be quite as high as for Google, given that one meteorite in the right/wrong part of the North Atlantic would take out their NYC and Amsterdam colos, and no doubt the Iceland one they're setting up now per recent email, see
https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/architecture.html for lots of details.
On the other hand, they're a lot more transparent than Google, their special sauce does not include their infrastructure, most of which is open source or they've open sourced, and no doubt due to their singular focus and relatively smaller size you can get contact real people rather easily, sign up for updates on their software and infrastructure, etc. Google is so big that, as you've discovered, they don't have to care.
I'll second the FastMail recommendation. I closed several Google accounts and migrated them to FastMail a few years ago and it has been a good experience. The UI is very much faster and spam filtering is every bit as good as GMail's was. No complaints about uptime, either.
I'd definitely recommend Fastmail. Fast, clean interface, easy to use, very customisable (including wildcard mailboxes), and great support. They've got a really interesting blog [1] with some technical content on there as well.
