It's more about shareable media. Relative to your analogy, I feel storing files in encrypted containers is renting an apartment and feeling confident about the landlord not walking in. On the other hand, if you hang up an obscene image in your window of your apartment, I imagine it's understandable that a landlord would use a key and take it down. If hanging up obscene images becomes a pattern, I think the landlord would kick you out.

From one perspective, I understand that cloud storage should include certain rights to privacy. If I buy some compute time on AWS, I manage and control all flow of data. It would be a complete violation if AWS policed the kind of content I could store. I think self-managed vs company managed is what dictates my expectations. Google photos and drive, especially since most people don't pay for it, fall into the company managed category in my opinion.

In the last few years Google Drive became more strict about sharing copyright work and started flagging files, which limits the ability the "share to anyone with a link". For people who use it as a backup, the advice I started hearing was to encrypt the data before uploading. The opsec while considering nation-state level threats to privacy already recommended only using encrypted containers since the beginnings of cloud storage.

The Communications Decency Act is an interesting law that dictates the liability of online content and service providers. There is an ongoing battle to increase ISP and host liability as a way for the entertainment industry to combat piracy.

FOSTA-SESTA and the ruling on Backpage [1] made things more difficult for hosts like Google and changed the liability surrounding sexual solicitation. If a host like Google knows what's being hosted and does nothing, they get in trouble. They don't have the protections they did in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230