For far too long, companies like Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox have abused their position and violated their users’ privacy.
Recent events have highlighted the problems that their business models can create. Protecting their users’ privacy conflicts with their business model, which is to use your data in order to serve you targeted ads. That’s why these companies collect more data than what is actually needed.
Google is a US-based company. The United States (unlike Europe, where companies like Tresorit, pCloud or Internxt are based), is known for its aggressive privacy violations. Google is also closed-source and doesn’t feature client-side encryption.
The reason these services still have hundreds of millions of users worldwide and continue to ignore the fact they seemingly don’t care about user privacy is because they’ve become complacent. When you have so many users, the duty of care for their privacy diminishes.
I do believe we’re at a point where this has to change, and we’re already starting to see that with more people using different services. Awareness amongst users is growing related to their policies around privacy, and that will continue to happen.