Tim Cook: Data Privacy is one of the top two issues of this century
Part of the worry that he has about Data Privacy revolves around threats to weaken end-to-end encryption. This is something that law enforcement around the world is serious about. “You know, I’m a big believer in encryption—in end-to-end encryption with no back doors—and so I do worry about anyone trying to break that in any kind of way or weaken it in any kind of way,” Cook says.
Cook made an interesting point when he brought up the concept of ‘Big Tech’ as an interchangeable group of companies that think alike and act alike. Besides Apple, this group includes names like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. According to Apple’s CEO, the group of firms known as “Big Tech” are not individually fungible. He points out that “I think it’s important for people not to categorize ‘Big Tech’ in a way that would make people view it to be monolithic, because I think the companies are actually quite different compared to one another. And so I worry about that broad, broad-brush categorization from the get-go. I try to encourage people to think a level deeper than that and think about the companies themselves and their business models and how they conduct themselves, and so on and so forth—what their values are. That’s kind of the way I look at it.”
Apple and Facebook, two of the companies in the ‘Big Tech’ basket, are currently at odds over Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature. Facebook derives a vast majority of its income from serving up ads and is in a position to lose a significant chunk of this change if enough iOS users decide not to opt-in to tracking. In fact, Facebook previously said that its ad revenues, which nearly hit $85 billion last year, could be cut in half once Apple forces iOS users to opt-in to be tracked.
