Given that Apple has the ability to control what software can and cannot run on your device (to a large extent), this is a praiseworthy use of this power, however, on the whole, it would be preferable for Apple not to have this ability.
Facebook still has this power on android. If you don’t want the protections of apples walled garden feel free to swim in the unregulated waters of android
Absolutely! We should have laws protecting our privacy online and offline, from governments and from private entities. We should be able to sue Facebook and their ilk into oblivion. Until then, anyone who stands for privacy is on my side and has my business.
In a world where there are no weasels like FB, constantly trying to see what they can get away with, I too would prefer that Apple not have that ability. But in the world I currently live in, I'll reluctantly side with Apple having that ability. And the instant they use it not to my liking, I can go buy some other brand of phone.
Leave it up to the user (or, possibly, their parents if they're under-age) and give them the tools for maintaining their privacy. For example:
Have appropriate app permissions (which we mostly already have).
State that only apps within the app store are monitored to be privacy-friendly/"trustworthy", while still allowing a relatively hassle-free way of installing apps from outside it, similarly to how Android does it (except that I don't necessarily trust Google to ensure that the apps within the Play Store are "trustworthy").
Label "untrustworthy" apps (similarly to how F-Droid labels potentially unwanted features).
Now, since Apple currently has more intrusive control, I want them to use it for "good", but I don't want them having this power in the first place. As an analogy, if there were policemen stationed on every corner in the city, I'd probably want them to prevent suicidal people from jumping off bridges, but that doesn't mean that I want the policemen to be there.
To me it’s a fallacy that even a highly skilled and knowledgeable person could set their own privacy settings to what they’d actually like. When you have huge forces arrayed against you, an powerful advocate is necessary.
> To me it’s a fallacy that even a highly skilled and knowledgeable person could set their own privacy settings to what they’d actually like.
Do you mean on a phone or on any computing device? I'm pretty confident that I've set the privacy settings to my liking on my GNU/Linux laptop. (Well, with the giant exception of tracking by websites, but I think that uBlock+uMatrix on Firefox still deal with that slightly better than Safari's blocking.) You could argue that in this case Debian (or the like) is my powerful advocate, but it's a powerful advocate who doesn't take away control of my device.
Given that Apple has the ability to control what software can and cannot run on your device (to a large extent), this is a praiseworthy use of this power, however, on the whole, it would be preferable for Apple not to have this ability.