Readit NewsFor some people it is a requirement to have a social life. It is not your choice to use it or not. Network effects are taking care of that. If you think Signal or whatever is a better choice, good on you. But if you don't want to cut ties with some of your friends, prepare to use multiple apps. Including WhatsApp.
The time you spend installing apps is minuscule compared to using them. And after that it is Netflix or google tracking you. Not Apple.
But then it derailed. Really hard.
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Apple is a lot worse then most of their users believe - but even at their worst, they're leagues more privacy focused and less invasive then Google, Facebook and Microsoft are.
But they're still getting worse every year, and the time when they were actually torchbearers for privacy have slowly faded over the years as MBAs have strengthened their hold on the company and Steve Jobs influence waned.
The problem with ad companies is not that they show ads. But that they are trying to paint a perfect picture of you to sell you stuff. And they are painting that picture by spying on you and your peers.
I hope that you can see the difference between spying on your users and selling that data to advertisers and using telemetry in some product. If you ever worked in software you will know that having telemetry can lead to massive improvements in the product. That said, that data has to be confined to the applicable use case and has to be anonymized.
If you really think there is no difference between ad tracking and telemetry you are right. Apple is a lot worse than people think, but better than Google/Facebook.
But if we are talking just about ads, than Apple is definitely not worse than people think. Because they hardly even have an ad network and when they ask you if you want to be tracked you can just select "No".
(P.S. Apple is much worse than you think. Look up Apple's first party tracking.)