Apple had* a privacy team that existed to insure that various engineering teams across Apple do not collect data they do not need for their app. (And by data I mean of course data collected from users of the apps.)

It's not that engineers left to their own will do evil things but rather that to a lot of engineers (and of course management) there is no such thing as too much data.

So the privacy team comes in and asks, "Are we sure there is no user-identifiable data you are collecting?" They point out that usage pattern data should be associated with random identifiers and even these identifiers rotated every so-many months.

These are things that a privacy team can bring to an engineering team that perhaps otherwise didn't see a big deal with data collection to begin with.

I had a lot of respect for the privacy team and a lot of respect frankly for Apple for making it important.

* I retired two years ago so can't say there is still a privacy team at Apple.