It is not hard to issue denial that isn't overly specific. From the summary "Apple does not track users' locations — Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," is much better. But, yes, that could be picked apart also. But for me, Apple's denials are, like so many others orgs recently, far too specific to be reassuring. For instance, they could say "we do not know of any backdoors in our products that are not actively being patched" instead of "we have not *created* any backdoors" See how much of a difference that makes? They could even throw in, "If we learned of a back door we would patch it as quickly as always regardless of which government or other agency might be using it"