Worse, these cloud storage providers actively mislead users into thinking their files are safe and durable when stored on their services. Google Drive and Apple iCloud advertise themselves as a safe place to keep all of your data, and will nag users of Android and iOS devices respectively into enabling their storage services, setting them as the default storage provider for documents, and enabling automatic deletion of local copies to "free up space". They want users to rely on them for all of their photo/note/mosc documents storage and synchronization needs, it's good for their business if they do. But they also don't want to store anything questionable and be held legally responsible, so they automatically scan all of the "safely stored" documents, and purge users who get flagged. So their business incentives align such that they - coerce as many users as possible to become maximally dependent on their services - retract those service that users depend on for any slight or potential liability and if business incentives say you do something, you do it, and no amount of techies informing the masses is going to outperform Google or Apple's messaging. So how do we fix this? We change the incentives; if you delete someone's data you should be punished. They trusted you with it, they may have even paid you to store it. If you break that agreement then you deserve some heavy fines at a minimum.

I imagine the overwhelming majority of them barely even know how to use a computer and just use Google Docs because it's convenient and they can access it on their iPad or their laptop. Most people, even most tech-savvy types, value convenience more than privacy, security and even reliability of the service. People are also in denial and believe that arbitrary account suspensions or other arbitrary moderation decisions can't happen to them.

No. Dennis Cooper lost work this way years ago. They need to be aware of this and let some of their followers help them.