‘Profit over privacy’

CUSTOMER DATA: ‘BEING WEAPONISED’

Apple boss says company fully supports law in United States.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said yesterday customer data was being “weaponised with military efficiency” by companies to increase profit.

Cook, speaking at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, said Apple supported a federal privacy law in the United States and also touted the iPhone maker’s commitment to protect users’ data and privacy.

Issues over how data is used and how consumers worldwide can protect their personal information are in the spotlight after big breaches of data privacy involving millions of internet and social media users in Europe and the United States.

Apple, which designs many of its products so that it cannot see users’ data, has largely avoided the data privacy scandals that have enmeshed its rivals Google and Facebook this year.

“The desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new,” Cook told a packed audience of privacy regulators, corporate executives and other participants.

He cited former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who in a Harvard Law Review article in 1890 warned that gossip was no longer the resource of the idle and the vicious but had become a trade.

“Today that trade has exploded into a data industrial complex. Our information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponised against us with military efficiency,” he said. – Reuters