Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phony in what way?
In the way that's not the result of a real pro-privacy strategy, but a unintended side effect of losing the voice assistant battle. Because Siri was getting behind, they now market themselves, directly or not, as privacy friendly . IMHO, they haven't yet found a way to market those vast amounts of tracking information without causing another scandal.
I think you need to justify your statement a bit more, as right now, it amounts to baseless speculation.
Apple's entire ecosystem is designed with privacy in mind, and they've consistently doubled down on it every time. Consider the Secure Enclave - Apple would be able to profit quite a bit if they harvested their users' data, but they have long since made the choice to encrypt it with a per-device key that is effectively impossible to extract.
Combined with their spats with the government to avoid decrypting or introducing backdoors, I think you would be very hard-pressed to find a company or culture that values user privacy more than Apple.
This isn't something they've done because Siri was falling behind. This is what caused Siri to fall behind.