I don't think that's a nitpick, that kinda voids their point entirely.
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.
It's still of value to have companies that have different incentives even if they will still try to prey on you, if only because you get to spread your digital footprint among competing companies rather than allies.
Going back to Apple, their stance on privacy is more geared towards their internal consumption (abuse?) than towards privacy violation-as-a-service for sale. That's not great but I'll take anything I can get.
I know what I'm sharing with Apple is up for grabs by them to use "against" me. And I know the same is true for Google of Facebook, so no real difference here. The problem is the next level, where what I share with someone else is up for grabs by Google or Facebook, or the other way around. This huge web of data collection and sharing is the big problem, not the posts that I'm volunteering to give to FB or the emails I choose to host with Google.
In other words, when you talk to me alone you choose to give me the information, you're aware I will use it in some way to shape my actions. If you tell me your phone broke, I'll offer to sell you my spare, and you won't turn red that I used the info. But if a stranger shows up at your door a minute later to sell you a phone we're suddenly having a different conversation. Same if you go to a pharmacy on the other side of town to buy some medication and the moment you make the payment I send you a text offering my regrets for your illness.
"A lot worse" can mean very different things if you talk in relative or absolute terms, or if you think some practices are just as bad as others.
I have a simple (simplistic maybe) way of ranking the tech giants for privacy: how much of their revenue is ads. Facebook is the worst (98% I believe), followed by google (~90% last time I checked). Apple is in the “least worst” category by this metric for now, but they are slipping.
It reeks of the same "both sides"-ing going on in US politics right now. I have an iPhone, and I refuse to install any Google or Meta apps. Am I being tracked? Of course. Is it still an order of magnitude less tracking than the former companies? I'd wager it is.
Don't get me wrong. Apple definitely has problems. But the thread was specifically about facebook and ad tracking networks. And to conflate different arguments that have nothing to do with tracking into just "Apple Bad" lacks a lot of nuance.
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".
Apples main advertisements are the app store placements.
You're vastly underestimating the significance of that, as this is personalized too. It's also been shown that you cannot actually opt out of everything, only some things.
At the end of the day, I still consider my Apple devices to be less intrusive then the android and Windows devices I use, but you seem to have an outdated view of Apple's business practices - at least from my perspective
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.