Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?
I'm willing to limit what apps I use and carefully consider what I install. I'm not yet willing to abandon my smartphone.
Choosing the lesser of N evils is a pretty common and often rational choice, in life and in engineering. May be not in this case, and it's good to be unsatisfied, but disregarding the debate just because neither option is great makes no sense.
(Of course, this assumes people bother to switch. In reality, this isn't even true in oligopolist party politics, let alone in oligopolist markets. In practice, there need to be a lot more, smaller options before switching costs are forced down enough to encourage people to switch. In phone markets, this looks like how people switch somewhat easily between different Android device manufacturers for their next phone. If we could get phone Operating Systems working like that, we'd really have something!)
The companies that can best resist the NSA are located outside of the US and EU.
With Google, you at least know what to expect. How many promises has Apple broken now?
They are also working around the margins to improve privacy. Google is not.
How many promises has apple broken? #stuffyoumadeup
Well that cut-and-dries it then, I'll be sticking with Android/Linux until Apple puts up a meaningful resistance to government surveillance.
Even this, from an Apple fanboy website: https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/devils-advocate...
US news orgs have a duty (implied by their extra-Constitutional protections) to ferret out NSA misdeeds but editors/journalists find celebs so much more intriguing.