It amazes me how many people see Apple's "privacy" advertisements and believe every part of it.

If I remember correctly, the catchphrase is: "what goes on your iphone stays on your iphone".

As always there's a grain of truth in claims of the sort - for example, it seems that to save server processing time, they don't actually do the relatively computationally expensive process of analyzing images for spying purposes - instead they have hardware acceleration for that built into the SoC, so the processing can be done on the device and the result can be sent off to their server - while the image remains on the device (or not, as whoops, it just got uploaded to "icloud").

Apple appears to not sell the spying information directly, rather they only sell access to interfaces that do things with "anonymized" spying results instead, even though you can extra data from those interfaces and a dataset built up of personal information can always be de-anonymized unless you can't tell the differences between any individuals in that dataset and in that case, the dataset is useless.

Apple has also taken some steps to prevent some 3rd party proprietary malware from spying on the user in certain ways sometimes - but that's only because Apple doesn't want spying competition.