I think it was Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly podcast who said that all these companies don't really care about privacy. Apple takes billions of dollar a year to direct data towards Google via the search defaults. Clearly privacy has a price. And I suspect it will only get worse with time as they keep chasing the next quarter.
Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.
I do hope that those working in these companies actually building the tools do care. But unfortunately, it seems that corruption is an emergent property of complexity.
The Google payments are an interesting one; I don't think it's a simple "Google pays them to prefer them", but a "Google pays them to stop them from building a competitor".
Apple is in the position to build a competing search product, but the amount Google pays is the amount of money they would have to earn from it, and that is improbable even if it means they can set their own search engine as default.
Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.