It's not only location data, but also the words spoken over these devices that's available for casual perusal....a recent acquaintance mentioned working for a Google subsidiary meant signing a non-disclosure agreement that stipulated their lead sheet came from recorded user conversations. "They record everything. I literally know everything about the person I'm selling to."
The problem with that claim is that it's verifiable – you could spend time reverse engineering apps from Google and/or looking at their outgoing traffic with a proxy. And there quite a few people who do exactly that, yet no-one managed to find anything remotely like this. Do you have any other proof of this? If not I'd advise you not to blindly trust this (or any other) person.
You believe CP is evil. You believe privacy is sacred. You are Tim Cook. What do you do?
If this is a sincere effort, clearly Apple has failed to thread the needle. This announcement could also be a fumbled attempt to reframe what is already a common practice at the company, to get ahead of a leak. I heard from a friend who's related to an Apple employee that Apple scans the mountains of data on its servers, already, for "market research". The claims otherwise... marketing gambits
