Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has taken aim at companies who harvest and sell your personal data. The 54-year-old was speaking at a dinner hosted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington D.C., where he was honoured as a 'champion of freedom' for his leadership at Apple.
"I'm 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. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be," Cook said.
Cook continued saying that the way in which companies are using people's data via advertising to fund free services is unending.
"You might like these so-called free services, but we don't think they're worth having your email or your search history or now even your family photos data-mined and sold off for God knows what advertising purpose. And we think someday, customers will see this for what it is," Cook continued.
Finally speaking on the topic of allowing a 'back-door' to make it easier for the authorities to bypass encryption he quipped 'If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it too.'
Apple came under fire for the safety of their online data storage service, iCloud, after hundreds of celebrities photos were leaked from their personal accounts.
