Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA.
By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.
For Apple, who sells their own hardware and OS and has always desired tight ecosystem control, privacy usually helps their profit motive, but not always - look at their approach to iMessage. I mean, iMessage already, and always, has degraded to SMS when sending to non-iOS users. But SMS has zero encryption features and is pretty horrible for privacy. And the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat means nobody gets encrypted messages. If Apple truly cared about user privacy, they could easily provide an Android iMessage client, or publish a spec. Not only don't they do that, they specifically broke the one client that worked around their intransigeance, which, despite Apple's spin, was way worse for privacy, even for users that only use iOS (assuming they ever talk to an Android user).
The whole point of having values is they provide guidelines of how to behave even when behaving that way is hard. Corporations are simply unable to commit to anything that could threaten profit growth, so we should stop pretending they're capable of having durable values.
Do you have any evidence to support your statements? Any arguments or just conclusions?
I hope you're not asking for any evidence of their authoritarianism, it should be apparent to anyone who knows anything about the company. They readily cooperate with authoritarian regimes; look at their behavior in China, or how they assisted the totalitarian regime in Belarus to the detriment of pro democracy protesters. "Obeying local laws" is not a valid excuse for unethical behavior, but is very convenient if all you care about is profit maximization.
Is their ad technology invading user privacy like Meta or Google? I have come across nothing discussing this.