A Tim Cook privacy-focused interview at the Time 100 Summit focused on why the issue matters so much to Apple’s CEO.
Cook was last month named one of the Time’s 100 most influential people of 2022, when we also learned that he would speak at the summit …
Tim Cook privacy stance
With privacy a major focus for Apple, Cook frequently speaks on the topic.
On Data Privacy Day in February, for example, Cook said that loss of privacy equates to loss of freedom.
If we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, we lose so much more than data, we lose the freedom to be human.
In April, he said that loss of privacy lessens us as human beings.
[There are two possible futures.] One where technology unlocks humanity’s full creative potential, and ushers in a new era of possibility. The other where technology is exploited to rob humanity of that which is foundational: our privacy itself. And that is a loss we cannot accept […]
A world without privacy is less imaginative, less empathetic, less innovative, less human.
Time 100 Summit interview
Apple’s CEO expanded on this theme in an interview at the Time 100 Summit this week.
Cook says he worries that people will become “restrained” and begin thinking and behaving differently as they lose their sense of privacy in a world where digital devices and technology become more and more adept at tracking their movements.
“I fear deeply the loss of privacy,” he told TIME executive editor John Simons Tuesday at the TIME100 Summit. “If we begin to feel that we’re being surveilled all the time, our behavior changes. We begin to do less. We begin to think about things less. We begin to modify how we think. In a world like that where we’re restraining ourselves, it changes society in a major way.”
Cook went on to say that it’s difficult to argue that people shouldn’t own their own private data. “It’s tough to say that a company, or anyone for that matter, should be able to step in and on an uninformed basis vacuum up your data,” he said. “That’s a large concern of mine.”
He also recapped the reason he was willing to compromise his own privacy by coming out as gay back in 2014.
The reason I did this is because I wanted to help young people. I saw what was going on was the LGBTQ community was being bullied terribly. I thought if I can only help one person by telling the world that I’m gay and that I’m proud of it, that I should do it and put my own desire for privacy to the side […]
I felt like I was in a position to do a lot of good….The big downside was my own privacy. It was something I was giving up myself, so you could sort of see that trade-off I was going to make.
You can watch the interview over at the Time 100 site.
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