That's messed up and makes it certain that I will never use iCloud. Losing my family photos is a much worse outcome than having them accessed by a hacker.
That is what you get when you want real privacy protection, no one but you should be able to access that data. That being said, iCloud is not really a backup, just a File Storage with syncing features, you should get another service (internal or external) to backup your data like Backblaze or a NAS.
