And no, Google is not doing something similar.

I didn't read it as the GP justifying Apple's behaviour, he was just warning people that Google does something similar ("I thankfully have a local backup of the photos I took").

You see comments like "Y does something bad too" on a story about X very frequently. May not be meant as a justification, but I think they are often distracting from the actual topic. If you went through the Terms of Service of similar services, you can probably find countless upsetting examples. So what is the conclusion? Let's just take it as it is, because everyone is doing it or abandon all services instead?

The latter, yes.