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Apple CEO Tim Cook slams Google and Facebook for selling out users
Hits out at Silicon Valley rivals for trampling over user privacy rights
By Carly Page
Wed Jun 03 2015, 14:55
Tim Cook Apple CEO talks at Climate Week New York September 2014
APPLE CEO Tim Cook has lashed out at rivals including Facebook and Google for trampling all over user privacy.
Cook delivered a speech remotely at an Electronic Privacy in Communications event in Washington where he was being honoured as a "champion of freedom".
Cook took the opportunity to hit out at the privacy policies of Apple's Silicon Valley peers, TechCrunch reports. He didn't name the companies explicitly, but was clearly aiming his comments squarely at the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
"Some of the most prominent and successful companies [in Silicon Valley] have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” Cook said.
"They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetise it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be."
"We at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make trade offs between privacy and security.
"We can, and we must, provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the Constitution demands it, morality demands it.”
Cook has not yet commented about Tuesday's passing of the USA Freedom Act which will end the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk collection of millions of Americans' phone records, but he is likely to be pleased.
The Apple chief delved further into privacy, hitting out at Google's Photos service for the information it gathers in order to offer the service free of charge.
"We don’t think you should ever have to trade privacy for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we're storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices," Cook said.
"We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they're worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for God knows what advertising purpose."
Cook rounded things off by turning his attention to encryption, addressing the efforts of policy makers to force Apple to offer a master key that would allow government agencies access to customer data held on devices.
"We think this is incredibly dangerous. We've been offering encryption tools in our products for years, and we’re going to stay on that path. We think it’s a critical feature for our customers who want to keep their data secure," he said.
"If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it too. Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there's a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it."
Cook's remarks come just days before Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference where the firm is expected to unveil enhanced security and encryption tools for iOS and OS X. µ
