If you own a device with builtin software that synchronizes part of the data on it to the cloud then it was never truly yours to begin with**

Fixed it for you. I hope you are not implying that Google, whose bread and butter has been selling personal information, has resisted the temptation for all these years?

I use Apple and it's an informed choice. I am pretty realistic about their practices. And realistically we don't have a choice. Either you use a smartphone and it's a Swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities -- worst of which are embedded in the device on purpose! -- or you don't use a smartphone at all. This is the era we're living in.

I hope that custom ROM Android communities can win and give us back some freedom but I am skeptical. Still, I am open to try some of the de-bloated Xiaomi ROMs at one point. Or maybe put LineageOS / PostmarketOS on them.

I didn’t mention Google at all, not sure why you brought it up

Because I dislike the implication that only Apple is doing it. No. Everybody is doing it. Apple was just the first to publicly admit it. Doesn't make it better, sure, but let's not delude ourselves at least. No company can resist using all that valuable personal data on the smartphones.

I didn’t imply only Apple is doing it either

Let's not argue over this all day. :)

The fact that you only mentioned Apple makes it a safe assumption that you only meant Apple. I chimed in to specify that I believe everyone is doing it, and let's stop at that. There's no prize to fight over here.

It’s an article about Apple so I only mentioned Apple lol. While we’re at it we should mention Microsoft probably does this too. Probably Snap as well.

Pretty sure they do, yeah. :)