Steganographic messages are pretty save, not so because they are very difficult to reveal, but if they see an innocent selfie, a photo from a kitten or an mp3 from a famous song, they don’t think tat it can be a hidden message and don’t cause further interests, like an encrypted unreadable message do. Snowflake is another thing, often used by journalists in totalitary countries. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/bocovich

You can’t escape when you currently appears life in one of the millons cams anywhere and even with this life in YouTube, additional to the surveillance of big corporations, banks and the own ISP. Privacy nowadays is relative, you can only patch the biggest holes. 100% privacy is stay at home and reading a book with the smartphone turned off.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=live+webcams+around+the+world

https://www.earthcam.com/

https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam.html

https://worldcams.tv/

etc… adding millons more used by police and govs with face recognition soft.

Snowflake or steganographic comunication, works even in North Corea, encrypted messages are not a solution, because they always cause suspicion in countries with strong surveillance and censorship. VPN are not the solution either, even in occidental coutries, there are a lot of webs which are not accesible with a VPN or Proxy, mostly streaming sites, eg. Rakuten and others.

Well, you can also buy an server or use an online service to selfhost apps as alternative to this.

Any image editor is valid, eg. Minipaint, which is FOSS, complete and works right in the browser (hosted in github.io), using images from eg. Pixabay (images, vectors, videos, gifs, music, sounds) which are all free to use (CC or copyleft). Really not a problem to create memes without copyright issues (and without AI).

Also devs want to eat sometimes and for services there are few possibilities to create incommings, turning it in a paid service, put ads or using afiliate links which ay an revenue if the user use these. A no go are selling private user data which are the methodes of big corporations, this is the real problem. But it isn’t avoidable, when you block these that also those which use ethical methodes are affected. The solution is only a clear legislation making it illegal to sell private user data to third parties, out of control how these use or protect these. There isn’t any other. Privacy is a basic right, period. Traffiking with user and metadata is a crime.

Ads are needed to create incommings needed by an service, but legit are only contextual ads, but not personalized ones results of surveilance and profiling, worst if also used with tracking and metadata logging. This is the main reason why the use of adblocker and other filter measures are mandatory, sorry for those which use only contextual banners to create some incommings.