[adamauckland]

People send their private photos to their private cloud backups with the reasonable expectation that those photos remain private and therefore not a privacy violation.

If it transpired Google or Apple had staff looking through people's cloud photo backups, yes this would be considered a violation because "cloud backup" is framed as a personal solution and not a hosting or processing solution.

[whyoh]

Google and Apple's staff do look at people's photos, at least occasionally. The typical excuse is detecting rule violations.

It's not the same as doing this systematically (like Meta here), but these are shades of gray. A serious privacy law would prohibit both.