To me it boils down to this. At some level, there is a point where you have to trust people/companies. I don’t have time to spend researching and installing custom software to protect privacy. I fully understand that there are people here who have the time to devote to that or want to spend time doing that, but it’s not practical for most people to really spend much time on it.

So, given that I have to trust someone (and for 99% of people on the planet this is also true) I choose to trust Apple.