Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. All of the ML that apple does for example is done on-device or is privatized [0]. This goes for all of their services that Google has built their business off of: Messages, Siri, Maps, etc. People don't respect Apple's security because they trust Apple, they respect it because Apple has intentionally shot themselves in the foot if they wished to sell their data in the future.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...

> Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has.

Huh? Apple potentially has everything on the device, just as Microsoft does. Maybe they don't touch it, at least intentionally, out of respect (or just prudence). But if I recall correctly, they accidentally logged all Safari URLs for a while.

Chrome has search and url in the same bar, and therefore needs to log all urls you enter (and their metadata) for the sake of logging all searches. Absolutely benign, right?

Safari shares the same url/search bar, but I have not read their license. Would be pretty surprised if they are not logging all URLs.

iPhone also sent geolocation coordinate files to Apple, until that was discovered. As you point out, there is a lot more than just the superficial concept of privacy, such as the Prism program that had/has a pipeline into Apple data. Like any large company, there are competing forces of strategically enforcing privacy and treating data in a way that doesn't respect privacy.

Dude, google has been doing diff. privacy earlier than apple. Even now, their researchers( one of them the great Ian Goodfellow-inventor of GANs) is working on federated learning. Heck google had even open sourced their diff. privacy system. Apple just made a big deal put of it when they started diff privacy.

Well as Mark Zuckerberg put it during the congressional hearing—and this is a paraphrase—"we do not and have never sold data."

Which is true. They don't sell the data because they directly monetize it. Same with Google. Google didn't just start doing that one day, that's been their business model since they started doing ads. Apple's business model is selling users devices, which they would jeopardize if they tried to also sell their users' data.