They've got your iMessage/Facetime chat logs, they've got your stored unencrypted data in iCloud, they've got the apps that you're using and probably their settings or saved meta-data as well. Speaking of iCloud, they've got your contacts as well. Your iPhone is collecting your location and the Wifi networks around it and sending it to Apple's servers. At some point the iPhone was saving your location history in a local file as well, ready to be inspected by whomever got a hold of it. The operating system is completely closed / proprietary, so if it has back-doors in it, nobody will ever know.
I'm glad that Tim Cook is raising these issues and I realize that behind every piece of data they have there's a justification for it. But in our country we have a saying which applies here: he ate no onions and his mouth stinks not.
Both of those services are encrypted so what useful data would they have on it?
I think Tim Cook's point is that they collect data solely to improve your user experience. If they stopped tomorrow they would continue making money. Other companies collect data they need for user experience plus data advertisers will find valuable so they can sell it/exploit it. If they stopped collecting data tomorrow they would die unless they radically changed their business model.
That is correct, iMessage is encrypted, however they still have your metadata (who you're speaking with, timestamps) and because of how iMessage works (asymmetric cryptography with multiple public keys managed by Apple), it's easy on Apple's side to attach a new public key and device to your account such that anybody can then listen to the messages sent to you. And so, because you can't settle on a specific public key with the person you're talking with, the model is kind of broken, although it is better than nothing.
XMPP / OTR is a much better option for encrypted chats. It's fairly user friendly as well. Unfortunately big companies owning chat services are not fans of open standards.
But this is kind of like your phone company having complete access to all of your phone records. It's necessary for their business, but they gain nothing from investigating them, just like Apple gains nothing from monitoring who you are speaking with via email when you use an account from them. Or, how a traditional email service provider or ISP from the 90s wouldn't have cared about who you were talking to or what hosts you were communicating with, or what the content of that was.
Google is different, very different than these situations. Everything is read, torn apart, analyzed, and sold. They are organizing the world's information, but they consider your private information some of the most immediately monetizable information.
There really is a huge difference here, and though we all love Google and everything that it has done for us, we must also realize the great amount of power that we have given it over us. Yes, they are benevolent now, but they have much much much more reason than Apple to become less benevolent, and far far more power than Apple does in many respects.
There's no practical reason for a phone company to keep your phone records around, since phone companies are just carriers (although they try pretending that they are not).
Google does have justification for analyzing your activity. They can classify you and improve your search experience. As an example, when I'm searching for "Ruby", I'm getting different results than what my wife does. And local search results are vastly better than anything their competitors are displaying. And then they claim that whatever data they keep around, they are anonymizing it.
Of course, that's probably bullshit, plus they've got access to a huge database of emails. But then we are talking about potential and pretending that Apple does not have potential to do harm, or that it has less incentive than Google, well I don't buy that.
I should mention that at some point I worked on a system that was integrating with Google AdX, which is the platform that is supposedly selling the information you're talking about to advertisers. I must say that compared to other RTB platforms, they actually expose less information. You don't get a reliable user ID, you don't get an IP and they reject your application if you're setting cookies. It's very hard for advertisers that use AdX to build profiles.
They've got your iMessage/Facetime chat logs, they've got your stored unencrypted data in iCloud, they've got the apps that you're using and probably their settings or saved meta-data as well. Speaking of iCloud, they've got your contacts as well. Your iPhone is collecting your location and the Wifi networks around it and sending it to Apple's servers. At some point the iPhone was saving your location history in a local file as well, ready to be inspected by whomever got a hold of it. The operating system is completely closed / proprietary, so if it has back-doors in it, nobody will ever know.
I'm glad that Tim Cook is raising these issues and I realize that behind every piece of data they have there's a justification for it. But in our country we have a saying which applies here: he ate no onions and his mouth stinks not.