This is not a top-secret story that's just coming to light:
2012:
https://hothardware.com/news/apple-reportedly-milked-google-for-1-billion-in-search-agreement
2012:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/14/apple-ftc-google-iphone-ipad?newsfeed=true
2013:
https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/g...next-year-to-be-default-search-engine-on-ios/
2014:
https://www.theinformation.com/All-Eyes-on-Apple-as-Google-Search-Deal-Expires-Next-Year
2015:
http://searchengineland.com/apple-google-deal-expires-will-win-safari-default-search-business-214277
2016:
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/21/google-apple-ios-search-engine-deal/
Google and Apple have been in bed ever since Maps & YouTube were pre-loaded into iPhone 1 in 2007. Just like with Mozilla FireFox, Google pays annually to Apple to be the preferred search engine.
There is an angle where we can frame it as Apple helping Google mine data but all Apple is doing is sending the user to Google by default when the user enters a search except for Siri which uses Bing.
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What would anti-Google users have Apple do? Prompt the user the first time they open Safari asking them what search engine they'd prefer? Once the user answered the question, Apple would still be helping Google every time a user searched if they had chosen Google.
I don't use Google's services except Voice & YouTube and don't use their search engine but I can't fault them for making an extra billion a year on an option that is completely up to the user and is changeable in Settings ---Safari.
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You raise a good point about the pop-up login screens that appear within Apple Settings. It's essential for Apple to support 2-factor authentication within those services w/o having to constantly change their code as Google makes changes to theirs.
As for what's passed over. who knows? There was a recent story about companies tracking what you type into a form in real-time without having to hit submit. If you type in your email and close the page, the email was still transmitted to them. Scary ****. I would assume Google does the same.
Their customers are advertisers. We are the product. That's their entire business model. I hope enough people will start paying for Google Music, YouTube TV/Red and other Google services to lower their dependence on advertisers but I don't think Google can go back from Android being free. They'd lose half of their marketshare if they started licensing it to handsets. Charging for a product to the consumer is just against their culture and their customers won't pay $5 a year to get Gmail ad-free not en masse enough to offset the billions they make from advertising revenue today. Isn't it like $75 a year they make per active Google customer? Could you imagine them asking a billion people to pay them $75 a year? No way.
