"'Trust me, bro' is not a great security model"—Mental Outlaw
"I'm very particular about who I let see my winky."
—wertperch
Google used to have a company-wide motto; "Don't be Evil", a motto that now exists only in the memories of those of us old enough to trust Google back in the day. Many of us bought into Gmail, Google Drive and the like, handing over control of our files and data to a faceless corporation that made money from advertising at everyone. They mined the contents of our emails, scanned uploaded images and in their EULA was (probably still is) a line that hands over control and ownership of those files to them. We have participated in our own manipulation
Facebook keeps detailed files of everything you post or upload, metadata that they use to manipulate what they show to you, be it advertising or others' posts. Facebook has become the CIA of social media, eyes and fingers everywhere, and I trust them, and Mark Zuckerberg about as far as I could spit a washing machine.
Amazon bought out the Ring camera company, and since then there have been news stories of engineers using camera access to spy on people. Now I don't care if they are watching some geezer shovelling snow off his drive or spying on kids running nude around a swimming pool. this is someone's private life, and should be inviolable. And this is not just Amazon/Ring, it's almost every camera company selling "secure cloud storage". THE CLOUD IS JUST SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER, and other people have access to that computer, whether trivially as admin/engineers or non-trivially by hackers or snoops.
Others (myself included) use something like Dropbox to keep backup copied of files, but can I trust them? Just because they haven't been caught yet, many are inclined to trust that they don't peek at your photos, read your documents or sell metadata to others.
Now I am a very private person. As a kid I hated people reading over my shoulder at anything I was reading or writing. This escalated as I grew up, and now I am very picky about what I share, and with whom. I am on the verge of paranoid tinfoil-hat privacy; I prefer Signal Messenger (because it's end-to-end encrypted and they do not keep either messages or metadata on who sent what) over SMS or any other messaging system, I don't trust Discord with my conversations and I sure as fuck don't trust Google Drive or Apple's iCLoud. Seemingly every week there's a news article on some data leak or security breach.
Some people (possibly you!) might say to me "If you have nothing to hide, why bother?" Well to illustrate, it turns out I have this body. For the most part it looks like every other male body; I am not ashamed of it, yet I cover it in clothing that hide my bits and bobs. Not that I have anything to hide about my body, I am just very picky about who I show it to, and when. Not just anyone gets to see my winky. Same with my data. My conversations, pictures and documents are nothing that anybody else hasn't got, but by Golly I should be secure in knowing that it's not visible to every Tom, Dick or Harry with a proclivity to privacy invasion. For someone to grab my phone and attempt to read my messages is akin to taking an upskirt photo of a woman. Some things are private and should remain so.
Trust no-one
Everything you send anywhere on the internet is likely to be stored "in the cloud", but to reiterate, THE CLOUD IS JUST SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER. Someone, somewhere can access that data, and that data can be used against you, whether sold to data brokers, used to build a profile to advertise at, or shared with the cops. YOUR DATA SHOULD REMAIN UNDER YOUR CONTROL. It's why I'm switching away from Dropbox and Google Drive and setting up my own peer-to-peer file sharing across devices. I am researching Nextcloud and SyncThing and will probably end up with the latter.
relentless says re The cloud is just someone else's computer: Heh, you might like the The forecast is dark and Cloudy writeup I had on this topic a few ago. I do agree with your paranoia though; convenience is never free.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
646