I absolutely agree, but what’s stopping them from accepting your money and grab all your data at the same time?

I wouldn’t mind paying for most worthwhile services, actually I already pay for VPN, email, etc, but the fact is that the old adage “if it’s free, you’re the product” is no longer true. Even services you pay for collect and sell an impressive amount of data. I wouldn’t mind paying for social media, but then I would also expect a zero collection policy on any metrics that pertains to my account or interactions with it.

You could have a look at startpage. It is basically a google proxy.