If, as a customer, you don't like what Dropbox, Google, Microsoft etc. are doing, then cast your economic vote and don't use the one product that represents the bulk of their revenue. Most companies earn most of their money from one, maybe two, products (focus on not using those). For Google, don't waste time with email, focus on search...and so on.
Google: Search
Microsoft: Office
Dropbox: File sync/sharing
etc.
You don't have to go cold turkey, but it's easy enough to switch one at a time. Help other people (friends/family/etc.) to switch as well. Big changes happen one person at a time.
More importantly, you will see change if a major corporation sees a threat to their revenues.
Cast your economic vote. Repeat. Encourage others to do so as well.
Or, if you're capable of reading between the lines, you as a citizen can recognize that expecting other people to risk prison time for your approval is entitled cowardice, and that you should be giving your government Hell for the laws in question.
Totally, let me just go and tell my lobbyist to petition them... oh wait.
Giving the government hell is all well and good, but it is unlikely to cause much in the way of change. If businesses start to feel the pain on the other hand, then they have the incentive to challenge the government about the massive monetary losses they face because the government fucked up the internet. Both giving the government hell and boycotting compromised services are valid ways of fighting back.
Yes, you and your friends boycotting companies is going to make them desperate enough for their executives to risk prison time in order to win you back.
But the issue is, that I don't know what exactly are they doing, and don't have means to find out. For example, I don't know whether they provided backdoor, how wide that backdoor is, i.e. at how many places are my Dropbox files, for example.
Publishing a transparency report is an excellent step and it doesn't deserve this sort of comment. Government surveillance is a policy issue first and foremost, concentrating on consumer tech companies is but an attention seeking techniques to make the news more palatable to casual readers, if corporate compliance bothers you then telecom companies ought to top of the list seeing as they never even mounted a single challenge, nor did they seek transparency.
If your reasoning is that they're not lobbying against this, then you're wrong. You can't expect people not to use the Facebooks or Apples, it's a policy issue. Pressure the government, vote for the right people.
Google: Search Microsoft: Office Dropbox: File sync/sharing etc.
You don't have to go cold turkey, but it's easy enough to switch one at a time. Help other people (friends/family/etc.) to switch as well. Big changes happen one person at a time.
More importantly, you will see change if a major corporation sees a threat to their revenues.
Cast your economic vote. Repeat. Encourage others to do so as well.