Oh, so you simply don’t see any difference between VPS rented from a reputable company and just storing data in google’s DB. Well, I assure you those are different. VPS provider does not scan all servers, extract all the certificates from them, setup a MITM to intercept decrypt and analyse the incoming traffick, scan all your DBs to extract your emails and than sell all this data to advertisers. But if you believe they do than yes, renting VPS offers no benefits.

That’s a good question. The hope is that the VPS provider is not reading the disk or sniffing the network traffic and using that information for commercial gains. For example, I could try to find a trustworthy VPS provider with a clear privacy policy for my music streaming server. To the provider, all they ideally see are encrypted bytes over the wire (probably using Wireguard or HTTPS for example).

Spotify, on the other hand, rely on customer usage data for their business. They sell advertising and do things like suggestions based on listening history across many users.

There is no guarantee that using someone else’s computer is 100% private. But it is probably more private than Spotify in this music streaming example.

Because it’s easier, more practical and cheaper.