Apple: Android is a tracking device [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Which is anonymous and the identity changes every 30 minutes or an hour, I forget which.

If you have some business model either coincidentally or intentionally in alignment of consumer privacy, you're going to see marketing said alignment so long as it's a potential selling point (if it's not, it wont be advertised unless you can spin it).

It doesn't mean anything though. It doesn't mean that either or any business has your interests in mind. Apple executives do not care about your privacy, no matter what narrative they weave. Apple probably banked on older ideals of consumer privacy and didn't anticipate businesses that disregarded user privacy and found ways of making money out of that process would be so successful. They were behind the curve and found a way to spin the narrative that the reality is they're just here to protect consumers all along.

Perhaps they took a risk that differentiating on privacy would be more profitable years ago and are pushing it more now there's real consumer talk (a wise risk path IMHO). No matter what, it's all profit driven. At this point there could be a bit of a sunk cost fallacy and it would be pretty awkward for them to shift but that doesn't mean they won't . Consumers have shown by and large they just don't care about privacy or at least are willing to sacrifice it for other things. That's bad for Apple (and bad for consumers frankly, IMHO).

I don't buy these narratives from any business propaganda machine and you shouldn't either. When push comes to shove, if Apple is down and forced to compete and privacy protection isn't profitable or they're not in a position to explore an alternative truly competitive position, they will jump ship in an instant and mimic the rest of industry.

The only thing keeping these models at bay are a distribution of consumers that keep the competing models afloat. If Apple caves we'd rapidly go down the lack of privacy hole of spying functions until we reach legal protections. If Android caves, we'll see Apples continued model for awhile until the insatiable demand for revenue growth starts looking at initial principles like privacy as the last remaining revenue streams then we'll slowly start back with 2000s era advertising back to current and future dystopian levels of privacy invasion. The difference is just a time factor here, so long as large enough segments of the consumer market will cave to these ideals (which has already been proven).

I suppose some business could just add a line item "privacy tax" that you just pay for depending on the valuation of your privacy so to keep your privacy you clearly pay that tax so the business continues to get its expected revenue growth from said privacy invasion without actually invading your privacy. To some degree this is already baked into higher costs for many Apple products but as markets optimize I anticipate we'll eventually get to such a point, just like we have ad-free and ad-infested service options.

There is no technical proof that any of the software or hardware we use every day is trustworthy. There is, however, incentive alignment that makes it unlikely that companies do wild and crazy things.

They're way past hardware.

Apple has always been a hardware company. Even before the ad economy online, they were a hardware company.

Google was always a "harvest and monetize data" company.