My sentiments exactly... This was a breach of trust on Intuit's part, and caused my data to go outside of my control. (Intuit, I paid extra for the desktop version of QB for many reasons - keeping my data locally was a big one.)
I searched online and actually found an Intuit page https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/data-systems/free-space-intuit-data-p...
showing how to go into Intuit Data Protect and CTRL-R to get to the data delete screen. It seemed to work and showed that it removed the data. No word on whether they have backups or other copies of that data, of course...
To stop future backups, see https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/back-data/disable-intuit-data-protect...
but it seems like they could just undo these steps with an update push, and continue to grab the data whenever they want...
