[thewebguyd]

Yeah, Apple collects a lot of the same stuff.

The difference for me is in the business model, and the fact that Apple offers true E2E encryption for photos while Google doesn't. If Google ever made their own version of Advanced Data Protection for Pixel phones, it'd be a wash.

[jeroenhd]

Apple does pose more private defaults, though they will easily steer your towards "make backups encrypted with a key we also know in case you lose your password", which isn't much more private than Google's proposition.

When Google announced their AI hardware features, I was hoping they they'd implement the same offline/encrypted photo indexing that iOS does, rather than shoving everything through the cloud. Unfortunately, Google Photos seems as bad as ever.

On the other hand, setting up automatic backups and photo sync towards a self-hosted Immich/Photoprism instance is a lot easier on Android than on iOS in my experience, despite Google's reluctance to grant storage permissions to apps.

Google does actually have a kind of extended protection (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/advanced-...), but that feeds more data to Google rather than less: it basically has you trust Google to protect you, by having Google pre-scan your browsing and locking down your account. If you're American, that may be worth it if you trust Google enough. It's a combination of Lockdown Mode and Advanced Protection Mode on iOS.