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Apple Confirms It Uses Google's Cloud For iCloud Services (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it's relying on Google's public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services. The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google's cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business. Some media outlets reported on Google's iCloud win in 2016, but Apple never provided confirmation. Apple periodically publishes new versions of a PDF called the iOS Security Guide. For years the document contained language indicating that iCloud services were relying on remote data storage systems from Amazon Web Services, as well as Microsoft's Azure. But in the latest version, the Microsoft Azure reference is gone, and in its place is Google Cloud Platform. Before the January update, Apple most recently updated the iOS Security Guide in March. The latest update doesn't indicate whether Apple is using any Google cloud services other than core storage of "objects" like photos and videos. The document also doesn't make it clear when Apple started storing data in Google's cloud.
You probably have iTunes Match turned on, which uploads your music in your library for your own consumption from your other devices. When the song is common to Apple's library, it's just linked and replaced with their "official" version. When it's "rare", they upload the entire track.
The benefits include cover art and metadata when available, plus a high quality version they have already stored.
You seem to subscribe to the misguided notion that this is a new or concerning development. It's not. The fact that Apple uses other cloud vendors as commodity services on which they build their own has been well documented for years and is even explicitly stated on a number of Apple's user-facing pages. For instance, Apple's Approach to Privacy page mentions in the section on iCloud:
If we use third-party vendors to store your information, we encrypt it and never give them the keys. Apple retains the encryption keys in our own data centers, so you can back up, sync, and share your iCloud data.
Apple hasn't exactly been shy about mentioning (in lectures, white papers, and other communications) that parts of iCloud have been built on top of S3 and Azure for the last several years. The only thing that changed recently is that they swapped Azure out for Google Cloud in some of their documentation, suggesting that Google likely outbid Microsoft the last time the contract came up for renewal. Given that Apple's cloud contracts are reported to be worth billions of dollars apiece, it's not exactly surprising that competition would be rather fierce and that Google would have been gunning for it.
As for your concerns over what the providers might do with Apple's data, as noted above, Apple is already encrypting the data at rest on those servers, but as a Slashdot reader you may want to dig your teeth into some more details. For people who are technically-minded, such as yourself, Apple has helpfully published an iOS Security Guide that does a decent job of explaining what all goes into their devices' security, including iCloud services that are used on their devices. It should be a relatively easy read for you, given that they've done a good job of taking deeply technical details and making them accessible in intermediate-level language. You'll quickly find that besides encrypting the data when it's at rest on third-party servers, they're also employing other techniques for securing their users' data, such as using end-to-end communication (with keys that they have no access to because they're always kept on-device) for a number of their services.
Aside from the technological means they've employed to secure their users' data that resides on others' servers, there's almost certainly also legal means that they're employing. With these contracts being worth as much as they are, Apple isn't simply clicking an "I Agree" button for a take-it-or-leave it Terms of Service that the rest of us have to agree to when we sign up with these providers. Rather, they're using teams of lawyers to negotiate one-off contracts with their cloud service providers...contracts which will no doubt make the lives of those providers hell should they ever try to misuse Apple's data. After all, that's how contracts between competitors tend to work.
All of which is to say, while I don't have any expectation that anyone here will rise above the standard of petty tribalism and glib comments, this site is at its best when it manages to do so. There are plenty of valid complaints to make against Apple, but flippant aspersions based on a lack of understanding about widely employed business practices that have been in use by them for years without issue is not the way to do it.