Well done and said!
You state your reasons, and everyone who wants to see things as they are will
agree with you. And you put some other contacts there, which is great, you
are not closing the door to your friends, just trying to get them moving to
another place, a safer place. The ones who do follow you you might actually
try to tell them about the problems that arise with Windows, Google (gmail
too), Yahoo, Amazon, etc.
You probably know already alternatives already, but here are a few:
Tormail and Lavabit for email (also, USE GPG!!)
Trisquel (obviously) or maybe they will at least be willing to "try the linux
thing" and install Mint or Ubuntu. You can always make them move later to
Trisquel.
Startpage and Duckduckgo for search engines.
You know the drill.
Anyway, I congratulate you on your decision. Bravo!!
