Spot-on - it is just a lip-service, and initiated after Jolla launched its Sailfish OS phone. Jolla was started by a bunch of ex-Nokia engineers who were working on the next-gen mobile OS, before Microsoft scuttled it.
The Jolla phone outsold the iPhones in some countries in Europe when it was launched (
https://www.gsmarena.com/jolla_outsells_iphone_5c_and_iphone... ).
Unfortunately, they couldn't maintain their momentum and had to get out of the business of making phones. (They still make their mobile OS, and you can buy a license for it and install it on some Sony phones).
At that time, Apple even had an ad-network for apps, and had got embroiled in the PRISM scandal (Apple, and other American corporate were selling their users data to US government agencies - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants... ).
Jolla was marketed with a focus on privacy.
To counter the bad publicity and the threat from a potential startup, they partly shut-down their ad-network ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/15/apple-to-shut-dow... ) and started marketing their new found love for privacy.
But from the get-go, it was never about user privacy - their goal was to ensure that the users data remained siloed within their eco-system, and their competitors couldn't get access to it. They also used the "privacy" angel as an excuse to further close down their devices, and make it incompatible with anything not approved by them.
(Note that it was due to their ad-network and because Apple wants access to users data that iPhones / iPad don't give you the ability to control what app can or cannot connect to the internet. This is still the case, except if you are on cellular data; if you are on Wifi though, an app cannot be blocked. While all the new labeling "transparency" feature and telling the user what data an app will gather from you is good, the feature that would really benefit every one better is the ability to block apps from connecting to the internet itself in the first place!).