‘This is surveillance’: Apple boss takes aim at ‘weaponisation’ of customer data
- Tim Cook warns of a ‘data industrial complex’ where there is a ‘desire to put profits over privacy’
- ‘If green is your favourite colour, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles … about the insidious threat from people who like orange,’ Apple CEO said
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said on Wednesday customer data was being “weaponised with military efficiency” by companies to increase profit.
Cook, speaking at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, insisted the iPhone maker was committed to protect users’ data and privacy.
Issues about how data is used and whether consumers can protect their personal information are under the spotlight after big breaches of data privacy involving millions of internet and social media users in Europe and the US.
Apple, which says it designs many of its products so it cannot see user data, has largely avoided privacy scandals that have enmeshed rivals Google and Facebook this year.
“The desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new,” Cook told a packed audience of privacy regulators, corporate executives and other participants.
He cited former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who in a Harvard Law Review article in 1890 warned that gossip was no longer the resource of the idle and the vicious but had become a trade.