New Delhi: At the EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a speech on encryption and privacy, and made subtle attacks at Silicon Valley rivals for compromising user privacy and monetizing the data.
The tech leader was honoured for ‘corporate leadership’ at the event and he took the opportunity to speak about the controversial issue of consumer data protection by companies.
Cook said, “Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs 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,” a TechCrunch report notes.
He further said that some of the “most prominent and successful Silicon Valley companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information.” He added that those companies were “gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it and that’s not what Apple wants to be.”
Although Cook did not explicitly take any names, but it was evident that he was targeting companies like Facebook and Google which rely on advertising to users based on the data they collect from them.
In his opinion, the so-called free services are not actually free and come at a very high cost. Even as consumers like the free services, they aren’t worth having the users’ email, search history, and even family photos data (read the recently announced Google Photos) and sold for advertising purposes.
He said that Apple products are designed to collect the minimum amount of data necessary to create great experiences. On the contrary, Google products collect enough data to offer users much more ‘delight’ moments.
Cook believes that customers should not be required to make a tradeoff between privacy and security and companies must strive to provide them with the best of both.
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