If you believe Apple's marketing, how do you explain Google not bowing to China and therefore not bowing to China's influence, while Apple seems to be doing just that.
Eg. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-apps-flag...
Caring about user privacy shouldn't have exceptions, no?
I didn't say that you did, in fact I explicitly said the opposite. I don't even know where that quote came from. I just pointed out that YOUR choice of quote contradicted your argument.
> If you believe Apple's marketing
I don't believe their marketing. I believe the profit motive, and I believe their actions they've taken in the face of Government and corporate demands for data access.
> Caring about user privacy shouldn't have exceptions, no?
You are falling into a weird self-defined trap of binary thinking. It seems you're asserting that in order to have concern for customer privacy requires privacy to veto literally all other concerns. I never said—no sane person has ever said—that Apple's concern for consumer privacy is their number one motivating directive. Everything is a matter of degrees; a matter of competing priorities.
Personally I don't pick Apple products to protect my data from my Government. I pick them because I want that pile of data to be siloed away from the likes of Google, Facebook, and the countless number of unethical data aggregators that I've never heard of. Apple's selfish commercial motivation to keep my data away from their competitors suits me just fine.
Put simply, Apple's functional concern for my privacy—regardless of the purity of their motives—works for me.
That's a disingenuous claim. While iAd did predate Apple pushing privacy as a mainstream marketing angle, it certainly did not predate Apple taking a strong position on consumer privacy. This had been a theme in Apple's corporate decisions for at least the past fifteen years, likely longer.
Furthermore your own quoted paragraph belies your own assertion. iAd failed in part because of Apple's "prickly attitude to sharing customer data".
Quotes from a contemporary article:
But advertisers became increasingly perturbed that Apple refused to give them access to the wealth of data iAd had on its consumers from Apple’s hundreds of millions of iTunes accounts.
Stefan Bardega, media agency ZenithOptimedia’s chief digital officer, told us: “iAd has long been a story of unfulfilled potential. Apple has unique customer level data that is hugely interesting to advertisers but has struggled to access that data in a way that doesn’t conflict with the core business.”
Another media agency ... said: “For me, they never understood that they needed to behave like a media owner, rather they could go it alone charging what they wanted, not sharing data, no third-party tracking...”
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-apple-is-pulling-dire...