There’s no need to be defensive or naive about Apple’s data gathering. It’s clearly stated in all of their terms that they gather usage data. Personally, I’d trust them more than Facebook, Google and most other companies. But to assume they’re gathering and storing no data is mistaken. It’s not your fault either, there’s a population-wide innocence about what data companies gather on us that will eventually be overcome as more people get exposed to the negative repercussions of what happens when data like that gets breached, hopefully leading to future laws clamping down on data usage and retention timeframes.

Data that Apple have on you includes but is not limited to:

- what time, location and what internet connection you use to do any of the following on an apple device: — open an app, and what app you opened — take a photo — look at your photo gallery — watch a video — basically do almost anything - also your iCloud files are all viewable by their engineers

Most of their staff only have access to anonymized versions of all of that data that engineers in particular use to find bugs and optimize UI’s, but thousands of their staff can view your raw data.

That’s not to say you should be worried. But you should be aware.