There’s no need to be defensive or naive about Apple’s data gathering. It’s clearly stated in all of their terms that they gather usage data. Personally, I’d trust them more than Facebook, Google and most other companies. But to assume they’re gathering and storing no data is mistaken. It’s not your fault either, there’s a population-wide innocence about what data companies gather on us that will eventually be overcome as more people get exposed to the negative repercussions of what happens when data like that gets breached, hopefully leading to future laws clamping down on data usage and retention timeframes.

Data that Apple have on you includes but is not limited to:

- what time, location and what internet connection you use to do any of the following on an apple device: — open an app, and what app you opened — take a photo — look at your photo gallery — watch a video — basically do almost anything - also your iCloud files are all viewable by their engineers

Most of their staff only have access to anonymized versions of all of that data that engineers in particular use to find bugs and optimize UI’s, but thousands of their staff can view your raw data.

That’s not to say you should be worried. But you should be aware.

Engineers having access to raw data may be true but it goes against their stated privacy rules

You could maybe make an argument that something like iMessage is a platform lock-in.

That seems like a pretty weak example. I use about half a dozen instant messaging apps (iMessage probably the least), and I believe that’s pretty common.

I recently tried to copy a bunch of photo albums FROM iPhone TO PC. Apple makes that difficult, because iTunes only supports synching data in the opposite direction. Also, it would happily offer to delete your photos from phone and replacing it with folder content from PC. Now imagine that you spill coffee on your laptop and the only copy of your data is on iPhone - Apple makes it difficult for you to access your own data.

You plug in your phone to your PC and it shows up as a drive and you copy the photos. You don't need iTunes at all.

Oh, I tried that, but you know what? Out of almost a 1000 photos I have on my iPhone only 97 showed up, ready to be copied - the ones that I took with the iPhone camera. Those uploaded with iTunes were inaccessible.

That’s when I decided to never buy an iDevice again.

That's (probably) because you had your phone set to optimize storage and store them on the cloud. You can fix this by going to the Settings app, going to Photos, and selecting "Download and Keep Originals" instead of "Optimize iPhone Storage."

This isn't lock-in, this is helping you by allowing you to take more photos.

This simply isn’t true, you can use iCloud, the windows photos app, or even just windows explorer to move photos from your iPhone to your PC.