> Apple does not sell user data or search information to Google

Yes, it does, for people who don't know how to change their search engine.

By this same argument your router is selling the data of people who don’t know how to connect to a VPN.

At some point - probably almost immediately - you’re going to use your phone to access a service or app outside of Apple’s walled garden. You’re going to connect to an open WiFi network, a secure WiFi network without a VPN, the wrong VPN, use Bluetooth, download an app, visit a website, make a search. At that point your user data is going to be collected by services Apple does not control.

By all accounts Apple has and continues to implement increasingly aggressive privacy protecting measures on their devices to minimize the amount and type of data third party users can collect.

I’m not an Apple apologist. But it’s just funny to me how someone could see all these services collecting their data and see Apple as the problem. Apple cannot save you from yourself. If you want complete privacy, you need to jump through hoops to get it, and you need to know a lot about technology across all levels.

> By this same argument your router is selling the data of people who don’t know how to connect to a VPN.

Is my router company getting money for this? If not, it's not selling. Apple knows very well why Google pays so much for the default search engine: to track Apple's users. This is intentional. Your Internet provider doesn't necessarily track you (at least outside of US) and you can't change any option in the router to affect that.

And for those people, the only thing that matters is having the best search engine as the default. Which other engine doesn’t track user searches and can compete? I can only think of DuckDuckGo, but I don’t think they’re good enough.

DuckDuckGo can be good enough, depending on your search habits. But in general, people who don't want to be tracked and don't know about alternatives are sold to Google.

That isn't "selling user data". They don't get personal identifiers unless you visit the search results page.

Except most people will do exactly this, without understating the implications.

Apple also prevents smaller upstart search engines from being established, maybe as part of the deal?

> Apple does not allow users to set a default search engine that's not listed within the Safari settings.

https://screenrant.com/change-default-search-engine-safari-i...