This feels like the perfect being the enemy of the good. What other company that actually sells products people want has a privacy record in even the same area code?
It sure isn’t Microsoft, Sony, Google, Samsung et al.
You pay premium for Apple because of advertised privacy. Yet every market analyst is well aware how they are expanding their ad business with very bold plans for the future. There is only 1 direction they can go - invasion of privacy.
They are not even trying hard to make it look like they are above ads revenue streams. Which is fine, as you mention everybody else is doing it in some way, but lets be honest here.
Google has a terrible long-term privacy record, but over the last several years they've taken meaningful steps to improve on this, to the point that they are pretty good. They are one of the only big tech companies that provide controls to allow you to tune what sort of data they keep, to download it (take out) or outright delete it. They've even rolled out default settings such as (18-month location wipe). They're far from perfect of course, and I still wouldn't consider them "private" though I don't think any tech company is that. If you really want private, unfortunately right now you have to self-host most things.
