Your bar for privacy is very high and accessible only to nerds. That's great, but not helpful for average users.
Apple is not absolute, ironclad privacy. Don't rely on them for covert ops missions. But they ARE providing a very reasonable model of doing business that requires no special skills on the part of the user and does not engage in the unrelenting surveillance that other companies bake into every corner of their products.
Is it "privacy"? I'm not sure. But it is definitely "not surveillance". And that's a very reasonable place to start.
What Apple does is partly "privacy theatre" in my opinion.
They shame third party apps you have given background location permission for using your location in the background (eg. gps dog collar app) while never alerting you when the first party Apple apps do the same "Apple maps / friend finder / Siri / etc. used your location in the background"
I think many are defining privacy as “no one has even the possibility of accessing your data”. To me, surveillance is actively instrumenting and recording data from a user . Apple seems live in a middle zone where the do not engage in surveillance, but sometimes make technical choices where they could in theory access or intercept data from you, though they have they have promised not to.
Apple is not absolute, ironclad privacy. Don't rely on them for covert ops missions. But they ARE providing a very reasonable model of doing business that requires no special skills on the part of the user and does not engage in the unrelenting surveillance that other companies bake into every corner of their products.
Is it "privacy"? I'm not sure. But it is definitely "not surveillance". And that's a very reasonable place to start.