Google has been pushing SMS 2FA a little more aggressively over the past couple of years, too. And I think Apple made it "easier to use SMS 2FA" in iOS 12 for the same reason.
I also said before that this is exactly why Facebook wanted to "verify people's faces for security purposes", too. It just seemed so obvious to me that Facebook would use security as an excuse to get people to put their own 100% accurate face scans into Facebook. It's also because Facebook used the same excuse with the shadow tracking (it's for your own good!), which is as ridiculous as Google claiming Analytics is for website visitors' own good.
No dude, Apple has an excellent track record for privacy of customer data. They don't share anything with anyone else, intentionally. It's a walled-in garden. They have always, and continue to, view themselves as a hardware company. They make money on hardware sales. I mean look at their margins. Any such activity, if called out, may lower their hardware sales.
Information and data is the modern day 'gold'. There's much more value to tying an account to something that with negligible doubt identifies them than just selling it to advertisers. It lets you create sophisticated models and track and model users' behavior across services, and even outside the digital domain.
There are also extrinsic benefits outside advertising. Apple, for instance, is also a member of PRISM and one can only imagine how many other surveillance programs across the world that remain classified. Companies are undoubtedly 'compensated' for their involvement in these programs, and the more information they have and can gain - the more valuable their participation would be seen as.
This conflict of interest is why I think we will never see any sort of significant guarantee of privacy at the federal level in the US. The more information companies obtain, the more information the government has access to.
I also said before that this is exactly why Facebook wanted to "verify people's faces for security purposes", too. It just seemed so obvious to me that Facebook would use security as an excuse to get people to put their own 100% accurate face scans into Facebook. It's also because Facebook used the same excuse with the shadow tracking (it's for your own good!), which is as ridiculous as Google claiming Analytics is for website visitors' own good.