Arguably all big tech companies do some sort of data harvesting though. Google is primarily an advertising and data collection company, and their data collection is more widespread than others - have you seen how many sites have Google Analytics on it, how many people use Android, and how many people use Gmail, Google Drive, etc? Apple allow data collection as long as it’s them doing it (hence trying to block third-parties from doing it - giving them an advantage).

If you’re worried about data harvesting, the real companies you need to worry about are companies like Acxiom/Liveramp, Experian, Datalogix, Neustar, etc. These are the companies that create profiles on you based on data they gather from a very large number of different sources (credit card data, supermarket reward programs, frequent flyer programs, mailers / TV ads you respond to, internet ads you click, things you buy online, etc) and sell them to advertisers. The big tech companies don’t do anything like that.

when compared to a small company or a college student trying to scrape data for a project.

How can you be sure that only small companies or students are scraping Lemmy/Mastodon data today? One of those 5800 servers that federate with your Lemmy instance could be funneling data to a data analysis firm.