Exactly. And Apple makes money of privacy. It's their thing.
Google's business model is based on abusing my privacy.
Apple's business model is based on securing my privacy.
That's why I use Apple stuff and won't touch Google with a 10 feet pole.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...
Some it seems thinks Apple keeps data private and anonymous. In fact they do the opposite and encourage using an icloud account over and over (after ever update). All of this data is easily acquired via a warrant at any law enforcement level.
A county cop (without a college degree) investigating his neighbor can get all this info simply submitting a scanned PDF of a warrant from a county judge.
One example: There was a person harassing people on facebook in a small local community. Sending obscene images and making threats. To solve the crime local law enforcement ended up compiling a list of just under 20 possible suspects.
Hoping to match an iCloud photo to a post on facebook a warrant was issued for all 20 users data. Apple sends an. encrypted file with all the data and then another email with the passwords
Long story short the offender was caught however almost 20 people’s data was looked through by local law enforcement. I stress local because this is not some federal agent solving a major crime but just a neighbor police officer who sends his own kids to the same schools as these other innocent people.
Disclaimer: I assisted law enforcement on this case and a couple of others.
Apple makes money by (among other things) appealing to a certain set of privacy conscious consumers. That's different than "making money off of privacy".
I think that Apple is often deceptive about the degree to which they themselves track users and store user data. I think its simultaneously true that Apple stores less information about [advertising] users that Google does, but is less straightforward about the information it does track, and keeps more than the average Apple user thinks.
Google is an ad company, and a hardware/smartphone company, and an enterprise collaboration company, and a cloud hosting company, and lots more.
Similarly Apple is a hardware company which is getting more and more of its revenue from digital sales, subscriptions and even advertising every year. They can and do track their users exactly like Google.
It is naive to think that any company at that scale has your best interests at heart. They will do whatever it takes to make more money, period.