Apple clearly agrees that things could be better, which is why they are changing it for the better. However, they can also, without contradiction, argue that they were not acting ILLEGALLY before.
Who knows when they will actually change it. They were going to have the change when iOS 14 released but they paused it when they received pushback from Facebook. Now on iOS 14 you don't have access to the permission setting and you can't reset your IDFA anymore either.
Why? Apple were creating PII. They were not storing or processing it. You can probably break the GDPR by incorrectly handling the IDFA you get from Apple, but that does not mean that Apple are breaking the law.
Reminds me of a quote by Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys:
"I’d rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever."
The only way to get better is to change the things you did incorrectly in the past.
This doesn't mean it was illegal (or even unethical). Fifteen years ago few people anticipated the privacy implications of smartphones and many people didn't anticipate exactly how much this stuff would be abused. But in order to get better, they need to change their policy.
I'm don't think I've ever considered MCA a great philosopher, and after reading that self-contradicting quote the outlook for that to change is still murky. Plainly: being a hypocrite is about doing in opposition to what you preach, it's unrelated to changing your mind.
It's strange too that you go back to 2005, what with the iphone was out only by 2007 and the IDFA launched in 2013. Incidentally, IDFA was create as a way to limit the methods advertisers could use to track users, even as it expanded the pool of users tracked. And in 2013 the idea that digital tracking, as supplied by for example apple, could be bad was certainly not groundbreaking.
