It's been a few days, I don't know if you or anyone else will ever see this but....

> I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted

man, me too! that would alleviate a lot of my concerns but the whole home server idea has struggled to gain any real traction.

>Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple?

There are a number of specific events as well as the over-arcing trend.

First and foremost, they aren't even hiding it anymore [1].

They have censored 1m websites and 2b individual URLs because other companies asked them too [2].

They monitor every god damn thing you do [3][4][5], yes even your android keyboard data [6].

And then make it available to law enforcement [7].

Finally, let's not forget, they are an ad company [8] so it's in their best interest to sell more ads.

So, all of that being said, the general trend is the most disturbing thing of all. As google grows their ad company, they are expanding into more and more areas of your life. Now, Ok Google is a household term [9], and they gather more and more data to sell more ads [10]. It entirely possible that you are spend more time with google than you do with anyone else. Your phone is next to you all day, you search with google, your email and chat is scanned by google, your keyboard actions are monitored by Google. Google earth takes pictures of our roadways and houses, google streetview takes pictures of the vehicles in your driveway.

They have root access to 90% of mobile smart devices [11]. Everything we do, say, buy, utter, mumble, research, discuss is being handed over to the worlds largest advertising company, whose job it is to direct traffic to people who pay them [12][13]. That means its there JOB to to dismiss legitimate content which is explicit censorship, with the additional benefit of the chilling-effect [14], and instead serve you something that will sell more ads [15].

> The worst thing for me personally about Apple is their schedule of obsolescence.

So much this! This one of the main reasons I avoided apple products for a long time. But with the privacy concerns these days, "not being able to upgrade RAM" is not a viable excuse for using google or Microsoft products. However, I still refuse to buy a macbook, linux works very well these days as a nearly drop in replacement for windows or osx.

So that's it. Apple is more secure, even if only by default without policy considerations, because their business model is about selling products, not ads. And when you consider policies, it's not even a close fight, apple is clearly the best large company when it comes to user privacy [16][17].

[1] http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/

[2] https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...

[3] http://thefreethoughtproject.com/snowden-allo-google-messagi...

[4] https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

[5] https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infocollect

[6] https://www.xda-developers.com/swiftkey-and-google-keyboard-...

[7] https://www.theatlas.com/charts/4JqqQblol

[8] https://privacy.google.com/how-ads-work.html

[9] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/not-ok-google/

[10] https://decentralize.today/googles-pixel-phone-and-other-ai-...

[11] http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

[12] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/google...

[13] https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

[15] http://searchengineland.com/google-continues-testing-new-sea...

[16] http://www.apple.com/privacy/

[17] http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/22/apples_iads_allows...