Apple's always-on pingback no matter where you go in the globe, even if you disable cell networks. I do believe they care about privacy, though if you look at features like this it's easy to see that they can be worse than Google if they wanted.
You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.
Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).
That's 1.412538 watts versus 0.003162 watts... hence why you can just leave it in your pack.
Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.
s/freezer/bottom of a locked filing cabinet/https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...
Make of that what you want