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