Quite the opposite. Use drives from as many different manufacturers as you can, especially when buying them at the same time. You want to avoid similar lifecycles and similar potential fabrication defects as much as possible, because those things increase the likelihood that they will fall close to each other - particularly with the stress of rebuilding the first one that failed.

Technically, no, but then they need another source of revenue, because servers at that scale aren’t cheap.

As if any spyware worth it’s salt didn’t install itself as service with an innocuous name. Something like “Facebook” or “TikTok”.