Tim Cook: We Shouldn’t Give Up our Privacy Due to “Scare-Mongering”

Tim Cook was in London yesterday giving an interview to The Telegraph, in which he covered a whole range of topics, including the subject of privacy.

Cook has always been a vocal supporter of protecting user privacy. In this interview and others, his message has always been that “you are not our product” – effectively criticising companies like Google that utilise user information to sell ads. He’s also very strongly against government use of data, something particularly topical in the UK, where David Cameron recently said that encryption should be banned; a ban that would include Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iMessage.

“None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn’t give it up. We shouldn’t give in to scare-mongering or to people who fundamentally don’t understand the details.”

His response to the threat of terrorism is interesting. He said that the privacy of good citizens should not be risked for the privacy of the few, and that no matter what governments do with relation to spying, terrorists will always find a way of hiding their tracks.

“Terrorists will encrypt. They know what to do. If we don’t encrypt, the people we affect [by cracking down on privacy] are the good people. They are the 99.999pc of people who are good.”

The interview is an intriguing read, one that gives us an insight into the mind of a man at the helm of the world’s largest company.

Source: The Telegraph