They have spent on _marketing_ privacy. Their court cases were a great exercise in PR. They still have the highest compliance rate with US government for turning over user data, which they hold the keys to, and the Chinese government. User data monetisation is not the only danger to be wary of, it just happens to be the one that gets trotted out most often.

The time to re-evaluate is already here, it's just hard to do so when you're already locked into their ecosystem.

It’s not as simple as taking the compliance rate. The question is, how much data do they hold that they can tune over. How much of it is client-side encrypted.

Twitter handing over the DMs for a user: very much problematic- they’re plaintext. Apple handing over the iMessage history for a user: much less problematic, it’s E2E encrypted. (though still an issue - metadata may still be plain)

Fundamentally it boils down to some trust level - how much of what apple says about their data storage is true?

For starters, Apple can turn in all iCloud backup data since they ditched strong encryption plans after FBI complained.

> The question is, how much data do they hold that they can tune over.

https://www.androidcentral.com/apple-may-have-ditched-encryp...

I don’t understand how complying with the law and not criminalising their employees is a ding against them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that used as a criticism of any other company, but it’s regularly used against Apple. It’s really bizarre. If you dont want companies complying with the law surely what we need to do is change the law and challenge governments. What matters is what they choose to do within the law, and as a customer I’m satisfied.

> They don’t have to be altruistic as long as their interests align with those of their customers.

Exactly. You just summed up why capitalism works in a single brilliant sentence.