- Yes it is a cost (though the cheapest option is just $1 month) and its a service many Apple users already need/pay for other reasons (photo and device backups for instance).
- I wouldn’t trust them with all my data either, BUT, Advanced Data Protectionnow exists, which allows almost all categories of iCloud data to be E2EE. The 3 glaring omissions which cannot be E2EE are (1) Contacts (2) Calendar (3) Mail so disabling iCloud backup for these 3 things is prudent from a privacy perspective.
- While Apple does generate some revenue from advertising, it is not in the same ballpark as Google (the largest data harvesting and advertising company in the world, almost all of Google’s revenue comes from targeted ads and data harvesting, they are utterly dependent on ad revenue. For Apple on the other hand, Ad revenue is just a minor supplemental source of revenue, and is mostly only in a few of their preinstalled apps (like news and the app store). While there ad business has grown, the vast majority of their revenue comes from selling overpriced hardware and (increasingly) selling services. So while its right to acknowledge that Apple does have an ad business, and this is or could become a conflict of interest for them, they are not comparable to Google in scope, scale, deliberate invasiveness or dependence on a privacy-violating business model.