If the CEO of a tobacco company say cigarettes do not cause cancer, should should consider this statement valid?

They didn't align their business model in order to further privacy, though. It just happened to shake out that way. If Apple cared in the slightest about issues like this, they wouldn't make it impossible to control your own hardware when you buy an iPhone.

That’s Apple cared only about issues like this. In the slightest is too narrow.

Plausibly they care for many things and trade them off.

That's fair. My point is only that self-interest explains more variance here than caring about privacy. They may genuinely care about privacy to some degree - just as i'm sure Google and Facebook do. They both just care about profit more, and for Google/FB, those things come into conflict. For Apple they don't.

Your stance seems unfalsifiable. If a company did exist that cared more about their values than profit, how would you recognize it?

But more importantly: who cares? We’re not judging whether Tim Cook oughta get into heaven.

People seem highly driven by the profit motive, arguably more than by most other motives. If Apple’s goals are aligned with mine and motivated by profit so they’re likely to be careful to keep from damaging their reputation... great!

It is falsifiable, i've explained elsewhere my reasoning, but i'll repeat it here: The same basic moral orientation that would motivate one to care about privacy would also motivate them to care about freedom. Apple's policy of not giving you sovereignty over your device is anti-freedom. However, the thing that explains both behaviors is self-interest. It's to Apple's strategic interest to focus on privacy, it's not to their strategic interest to focus on freedom. Therefore, the most likely explanation for their behavior is their strategic self-interest, and not any moral orientation towards privacy.

It's also been brought up by others that Apple discards its privacy morals when it comes to China. Which is another point in the "probably doesn't actually care about privacy" column. Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is most often true. The simplest explanation here is self-interest.

so in summary you are saying 1. Apple is selfish (like any other company). 2. Their self interest is coupled to user privacy (but not freedom or moral values).

I'm saying that their stance on privacy is motivated by self-interest. Nothing more, nothing less.

What disincentives are implicit in Apple's business model that discourages collecting more data from their users?

Not collecting user data is something that only Apple can do. Google depends on data collection for its primary revenue stream. Apple does not. This means that focusing on privacy is a uniquely competitive tactic for Apple to take, and they have shrewdly taken it.

To be absolutely clear, i'm not disparaging them for taking this position. I think it's great. I'm just trying to contextualize it.

And yet we know that the personal data of your customers is worth billions.

And we also know that nothing about writing walled software ecosystems prevents one from syphoning this data.

So it would appear that Apple has purposefully left money on the table.

So please tell me how that fits with your 'self-interest' explanation of Apple's stance here.

I already have elsewhere in this thread, but here goes: Google's primary business model is contingent on user data collection. Apple has the most profitable business in the world, which is not contingent on user data collection. Yes, you are absolutely correct that Apple is leaving a few billion dollars on the table by not doing this. However, that's only true in a fairly narrow, greedy (in the sense of a 'greedy algorithm') sense.

Taking a more strategic perspective, you would look around and see that your competitors have to collect this data to survive. But you don't. That makes this a weakness for them, which means that it's a differentiating factor for your product that they can never copy. This strategic advantage is worth much more than the few billion in quick cash they might pick up by monetizing their user data.

But we see that the general public's relationship with privacy is a lax one at best and at a time when AI solutions are the breakthroughs and revenue generators of the future, that Apple is restricted to an uncertain trajectory. Are you sure that the market value of data and their derived innovations aren't worth more in dollar terms than the privacy market?

Not only that, but having taken this stance so strongly, it makes any future relaxations of their self-imposed rule an even riskier move as it exposes them to hypocrisy. So it's clearly a double edged sword. And while it's certain Google depends on data now, nothing stops them from making excellent phones with excellent hardware with privacy to boot to compete with Apple on their turf.