App tracking alert in iOS 13 has dramatically cut location data flow to ad industry

There's a bit of both to it. Their privacy approaches generally are better, but since they don't have a significant advertising component to their business, it's easier for them to behave that way.

Ben Thompson, who writes the tech-industry/business site Stratechery, has a term for this that I really like: "strategy credit". His definition is:

Strategy Credit: An uncomplicated decision that makes a company look good relative to other companies who face much more significant trade-offs.

If you click through to the article, Apple's privacy stance is one of the main things that he came up with the term to describe. Their business mostly wouldn't be helped by retaining a ton of data (though that's less clear recently as they're starting lean more heavily on services), so it's relatively safe for them to collect less data than other companies want to.

It's for marketing, but it's backed by the fact that Apple's business model isn't built around shoving ads in your face or selling your data. Many tech companies make money by selling you discounted hardware or giving you a free service in exchange for your privacy. Apple makes money by selling hardware at a premium and selling you services. They have determined that there is a substantial market that is willing to pay more money for goods and services rather than get a discount in exchange for privacy.

Apple's current prioritization of privacy genuine or mostly marketing?

How would you tell?

Apple has always been great on certain things. Tangential to privacy, Apple's security is always top notch. The iOS security whitepaper is brilliant, and is legitimately used as teaching material at the best university's for CS in the world.

Furthermore, Apple, unlike Google, Facebook, and Amazon (though less so than the others) do not make business for selling ads. So there's no incentive for them to track or help track user activity.

And part of it that doesn't necessarily play into profits is that Apple, as people well know, loves to be authoritative on what they consider "correct". They're not afraid to pull off what they consider as bandaids.

32bit support? Gone

Headphone jack? Gone

Variety of ports? Gone

Keeping in mind that Apple is not a single entity, but a very large group of people (over 100,000 at this point), I'm sure there are people with a variety of thoughts on the subject within Apple. That said, direction often comes from the top, and I'd think that as a gay man Tim Cook fully understands the value of privacy. I think that he has personally set that direction for the company and sincerely believes in the idea of privacy himself. Whether the people implementing it share his (or your, or my) vision is another story, but I think it gives us a clue as to their thoughts.

Contrast that with Google's Eric Schmidt who thinks "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.". I think that speaks volumes about Google.

I think it's baked into the company culture. Not the privacy bit specifically, but the way they approach things just naturally leads them to have better stances on privacy. Asking whether it's "genuine" or "marketing" is like asking me if I do martial arts because it's good exercise or because I genuinely enjoy it. It's both.

It's not just that Apple doesn't make its money by hoovering up data. It's more that, as a company, they're big on making a cool thing you want and charging you money for it. For some reason, much of corporate America has tried to move away from that basic thing and try to do exotic methods of extracting revenue like financing schemes or whatever. But Apple has always just been kind of like "Here's a cool thing and here's what it costs." They don't even really do sales or discounts that much aside from the modest education discounts they offer to students.