Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.
Privacy by design while making a seven-figure salary because you make people buy stuff they don't really need is quite difficult ;)
In this case it looks like EU is requiring to let competitors mess with Apple users privacy.
Not quite.
It is up to Apple to design a system in which operators (even Apple) can't see your data. Apparently they designed it in a way that operator can see it (so it is cool if it is Apple, but not cool if it is someone else).
Is this the new excuse for user hostility? Instead of "think of the children" it's "think of your privacy"?