It's "Can you trust them more than the alternatives?"
Yes, you can almost certainly keep your private data more secure in a system you build and monitor yourself(1). Until an NSA or GCHQ-level entity takes interest in you, and uses a 0-day exploit on your system or just physically walks in with a warrant and steals your physical media. How is that functionally different from "If the NSA / GCHQ takes interest in you, they can have the cloud service provider hand your data over?" And that's before you add the overhead of maintaining, securing, and physically protecting your own systems.
(1) Note that even this step is a huge hurdle for most people; "You cannot trust cloud services" basically tells those people "Don't use the Internet."
grab * -ss 834-29-1293
or whatever they do.http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssns/HGJune2411_final...
Even NSA do not like to invade peoples homes. Its a health risk for agents, its costly, it competes with other agencies, and its bad for PR. The legal steps required are also much smaller when asking a cloud service to hands over information.
It doesn't really matter whether the NSA or GCHQ are tapping Google's datacenters, paying off low-level employees, operating under a legal court order, or benefiting from the enthusiastic help of Google executives. The end result is the same: You cannot trust cloud services.