No they never were, they were "do no evil" but at the exact same time everyone knew they were an advertising company and most people in the field could see where it was heading eventually, or at least i'd hope.

Apples motives are different, selling premium hardware and MORE premium hardware, they wouldn't dare fuck that up, their nestegg is hardware and slowly more services tied to said hardware ecosystem (icloud subs, tv subs etc). Hence the privacy makes sense to pull people into the ecosystem.

Google... everything google does even phones, is for more data gathering for their advertising revenue.

Google was cool, once upon a time, but they always used your personal info pretty openly. The CEO a himself famously said, “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Apple has taken a markedly different approach, and has done so for years - E2E encryption, hashing and segmenting routes on maps, Secure Enclave, etc.

While I think it’s perfectly reasonable to “trust no one”, and I fully agree that there may be things we don’t know, I don’t think there it’s reasonable to put Apple on the same (exceedingly low) level as Google.

Google's entire buisness model was built on hoovering up and selling access to user data in the form of AdSense. Without that data, their business falls apart.

Apple's business model is to entice people into a walled garden ecosystem where they buy lots of expensive hardware sold on high margins. They don't need user data to make this work, which is why they can more comfortably push features like end-to-end and no-knowledge encryption.