There is a simple solution to this: don't trust providers to do what they say they'll do with your data. You should scrub any drive that's ever contained sensit

There is a simple solution to this: don't trust providers to do what they say they'll do with your data. You should scrub any drive that's ever contained sensitive info before you throw it away, and terminating a VM instance is precisely equivalent to handing the VM's harddrive to your provider. It's pretty easy nowadays to scrub a drive. Writing zeroes would suffice. Personally, I'd worry more about what data is being leaked when your VM is paged to disk on your provider's servers. Parts of each of your VMs will probably reside in the pagefile at some point, so therefore writing zeroes won't save you if the provider has bad disposal practices (like not scrubbing before disposal). So it seems impossible not to have to trust a cloud computing provider whatsoever; some basic trust seems to be a requirement. But that minimum level of trust should be the extent to which you trust them. Not scrubbing your drive before handing it over is placing faith where faith doesn't belong.