invidious redirect of the yt video
One thing is being aware of bad actors on the internet, in that case IOS could be an option, other thing is being aware of the mass surveillance and manipulation across the digital space, and that's the thing we're more worried about in communities like this, in such case, IOS is no better than shooting yourself (i understand the point of the difficulties of having a custom rom, but that's just a skill issue).
You can't become privacy conscious without sacrificing something, some friend will go away calling you a paranoid, somo products you own will become garbage, that's just normal here.
No, they don't care about privacy. It is just marketing buzz. They give Google and Facebook access to internal data for money. They give governments access to iCloud data for market share.
They then design the OS full of dark patterns to trick you into enabling iCloud. They have telemetry on every aspect of the operating system from a timeline down to the millisecond as to when and where you opened and closed browser tabs, to what application was consuming power at a given time, to where you go and what bluetooth and wifi devices you saw along the way. Metadata scrapers index the contents of your devices under the guise of making it "smart and helpful." The health monitor is ostensibly capable of dead reckoning location tracking, and you have to jump through hoops to even shut off BTLE when the phone is off.
Their communications platforms log all sorts of metadata, (this can easily be seen by requesting a GDPR data dump) and if one believes they don't tee every iMessage conversation off to three letter agencies and who knows where else, one would be sorely mistaken. (This, I don't know of direct evidence of, so it is more inferred based on how the messaging technologies work and how the government(s) wouldn't truly allow privacy to exist.)
One can't even stop their Apple product from talking to Apple servers, as they run access to their own systems on a layer of abstraction above the user's userspace network layer. If they so choose, they can brick your phone at a moment's notice using their "activation" infrastructure.
Nothing they do is privacy-oriented, beyond making it slightly difficult for Johnny the bicycle thief to gain access.
All without any of the code being available for inspection.