I find that it's quite common that people think that because other mega corporations are horny for your data that Apple is conceptually similar, even though they are very different in practice and it can be hard to explain how Apple can do privacy features not from the goodness of their heart, but from a cold business perspective and from organisational entropy over 40-odd years.
Apple is not a good company. No trillion dollar company is good, but...
- Apple has been selling products and services from the beginning, it has been going very well for them, why would any massive corporation bother changing their business model if it's going well.
- Why waste money to develop the data harvesting infrastructure to become like your competitors when you can turn your ambivalence towards data harvesting into a significant market differentiator.
A lot of Apple features are designed so that Apple has as little of your data as possible. I don't strictly take their word for it, I take their word for it because of the lack of personal data leaks and the specificity to which they advertise their security measures, and it would be a pretty big reputational risk to lie about for instance, splitting Maps requests up, sending them to Apple with a random rotating identifier and then returning the results to the user so Apple didn't know who made the request.
