You lost me there. Privacy is a human right. Would Apple be silent if China tortured gay people, too, because of "cultural differences" and just because it's trying to add an extra billion dollar to its balance sheet?
Now I can understand the argument that as a for-profit corporation Apple is "neutral" to the laws in various countries. But to take it much further say that privacy is not important - well, that's where I disagree completely. Some countries care about respecting human rights, others don't. That doesn't mean human rights are not important because some large economic powers don't respect them. Otherwise the US may have never abolished slavery either, if it was "all the same" and human rights didn't matter or were "relative" from the viewer's perspective.