Professionally or personally (got my idea from this thread).
Maybe it’s because I don’t work with it directly, but I don’t see the benefits other than people not wanting to manage the servers themselves. It adds complexity (eg SQL Server vs SSAS) while putting your data behind some amorphous entity where you don’t know what goes on.
And for communists it’s a privacy nightmare. Convenience shouldn’t be a selling point when you have no idea what anything you’re putting up there is bring used for or if it’s accessed at all. Google Drive, Telegram, Discord, have all been said that they use “The Cloud”™️ and make it easier for people to use.
We live in a world where tech envelops almost every aspect of our lives, yet the amount if basic knowledge people have is abysmal. There really needs to be attempts to taking computers seriously and not assuming everything is friendly. People should be aware that “The Cloud”™️ means some corporate entity controls your data, that “encrypted” messaging is not safe when done through software controlled by Facebook, or that using Windows puts your trust entirely in a company that has never deserved it.
Privacy concerns aside, I think it’s a convenient solution for people without the time or know-how to do anything different. It’s as simple as drag and drop and they don’t have to worry about replacing faulty hardware if the server goes down. But like you said, the privacy aspect kinda invalidates all that for those who care about privacy. I’ve stopped using cloud storage since I’ve become more privacy-conscious a few years ago and have moved to syncing important files across my devices with Syncthing instead. I have been toying with the idea of self-hosting my own cloud storage, but I don’t really have any reliable hardware at the moment.
It’s also worth mentioning that it may be possible to securely use a cloud storage service with the help of a tool like Cryptomator. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s a FOSS program that allows you encrypt your data yourself before you upload it to the cloud.
Syncthing is criminally underutilized. It’s p2p, entirely self-reliant, and incredibly fast. But since it doesn’t upload to the cloud, it confuses people despite essentially being like Dropbox. And I don’t want to sound elitist as tech education (at least in the US) is absolutely miserable. Bourgeois hegemony has dictated that the only thing to learn is Microsoft Office and everything else is magic and left to tech nerds. I don’t know if it’s still the case now with Office as it was 20 years ago, they may have switched to teaching Google Docs, but the point still stands.