From a while to c, Tim cook has become one of the most important voices in defending consumer rights regarding privacy and abuse by various technology companies. Today, the executive participated in an interview that served as the opening of the TIME 100 Summit, event of the famous magazine, and reiterated some points already placed on the topic and share other opinions about Apple, values ​​and policy.
One of the first issues that Cook and his interviewer journalist Nancy Gibbs of TEAM it was in relation to the supposed “values” of a company. According to Cook, large companies, being nothing more than a huge group of people, need to have values ​​as well as individuals, and those values, as well as the world's problems to be addressed, need to be decided together.
I see the world today and think that the problems we face cannot be solved only by the government; we should not resort to the government to end the problems. I think the issue involves the public sector, the private sector, and academia sort of working together to solve these mammoth problems. An example: climate change will not be solved only by the government, right? So we need to position ourselves and participate in the conversations because, I believe, the way we do things says as much about us as we do.
Cook also repeated a phrase he has used when asked about Apple's sociopolitical actions, stating that the company "has policies, not a policy" (in the ideological sense of the term).
Asked how to deal with such controversial issues in an increasingly polarized world, the executive replied:
The questions on which we stand are questions that we feel have some relevance () or where we have something of value to say, so that we will not be just another voice in the crowd this, we are not simply giving an opinion. These are things like immigration, education, environmental protection, privacy, human rights. These are very important subjects for our employees. We are an immigrant company.
The CEO also slightly expanded his advocacy of technology regulation to defend user privacy, which at first glance may be at odds with Cook's ever-free-market stance.
Even though I'm a big supporter of the free market and knowing that some unexpected things can happen to regulation, I think we need to be intellectually honest and admit that what we're doing isn't working. Companies need to be regulated. We have many examples in which the lack of regulation has resulted in great harm to society. And when these things get out of hand and we don't have a real idea of ​​the cost they bring, you need to do something about it.
Cook also took the opportunity to present a slightly broader and more insightful view of Apple's dispute with the FBI (and thus the US government) in the case of the San Bernardino iPhone. According to him, the legal dispute (which was closed the day before the hearings) was “manipulated”.
I wish the case had been taken to court, to be honest, but it was closed the day before. Now that the Inspector General's reports have started to come out, our suspicions have been confirmed: the case has been extremely manipulated from the beginning. So I think it was not the best time for the government I personally had never seen the state apparatus act against a company as it did there, and it was all done in a very dishonest way.
An excerpt from Cook's interview can be seen below:
What did you think?
via 9to5Mac
