Well, the core of the different stance is just marketing. Both Apple and Google comply with federal warrants, etc... That's obvious. Neither of them have any

Well, the core of the different stance is just marketing. Both Apple and Google comply with federal warrants, etc... That's obvious. Neither of them have any intention of ever letting a 3rd party access user data, that should hopefully also be obvious. As in, neither company sells your information. It'd be a PR disaster, and in the case of Google it would be a massive loss of revenue as it would undermine their entire ad business. So the only difference is what data they actually have access to, and it's not actually that different. The big difference is iMessage has end-to-end encryption by default so long as you're talking to another iMessage user. That's sorta it, though, and that gets largely neutered by the fact that the messages are then immediately backed up on iCloud anyway and that end-to-end encryption is lost in the process (otherwise you couldn't restore to a new device). Google now offers that, too, via allo's off-the-record, though. Everything else is pretty much the same between Apple & Google with regards to meaningful privacy.