[bad_user]

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.