> or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?

It sounds like you're equating "tech industry" with Big Tech¹, but the tech industry is not an evil monolith. Even Alphabet is not an evil monolith, Apple is a radically different beast than Meta, etc.

If you've decided that working in tech is default evil, you could choose a political path focused on breaking up and regulating Big Tech. But there are also plenty of good people leveraging tech for good, too.

¹a.k.a. "MANAMANA": Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe