Yesterday evening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was honored for corporate leadership during EPICs Champions of Freedom event in Washington. Cook spoke remotely to the assembled audience on guarding customer privacy, ensuring security and protecting their right to encryption. <\/p>\n
Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security, Cook opened. 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. <\/p>\n
This marked the first time that EPIC, a nonprofit research center in Washington focused on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues, has giventhe honor to a person from the business world. The hosts of the event included cryptographer Bruce Schneier, EPIC president Marc Rotenberg, Lobbyist Hilary Rosen and Stanford Lecturer in Law Chip Pitts. <\/p>\n
Cook was characteristically passionate about all three topics. A theme that has persisted following hisappearance on Charlie Rose late last year to define how Apple handled encryption, his public letter on Apples new security page in the wake of the celebrity nude hacking incidentsand his speech earlier this year at President Obamas Summit on Cybersecurity at Stanford an event which was notably not attendedby other Silicon Valley CEOs like Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoos Marissa Mayer and Googles Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. <\/p>\n
Cook lost no time in directing comments at companies (obviously, though not explicitly) like Facebook and Google, which rely on advertising to users based on the data they collect from them for a portion, if not a majority, of their income. <\/p>\n
Im speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information, said Cook. Theyre gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think thats wrong. And its not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. <\/p>\n
Cook went on to state, as he has before when talking about products like Apple Pay, that Apple doesnt want your data. <\/p>\n
We dont think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that were storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices, Cook went on, getting even more explicit when talking about user privacy. <\/p>\n
We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we dont think theyre worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is. <\/p>\n
That, in case you missed it, is an epic subtweet of Googles Photos product, which was just rolled out at I\/O.The fact that Photos is free of charge, and Apples products are not likely spurred the talk about very high costs. <\/p>\n
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