Zuckerberg swats back at Apple.
Mark Zuckerberg fires back at Apple’s Tim Cook by contrasting Facebook’s free service with Apple’s expensive products
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, engaged in damage control after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, isn’t taking all the criticism lying down: He has hit back at recent comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Cook said during an interview last week with Recode and MSNBC that he wouldn’t be in the situation Zuckerberg is in — having to defend his company’s approach to privacy after revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained Facebook user data to try to influence the 2016 presidential election — because Apple doesn’t “monetize” its customers.
In an interview published Monday, Zuckerberg called Cook’s comments “extremely glib.”
He referred to the Menlo Park company’s oft-stated mission of connecting “everyone in the world,” said not everyone can afford to pay for such a service, and that an ad-supported platform such as Facebook is the “only rational model.”
“If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people
can afford,” Zuckerberg told Vox’s Ezra Klein.
Apple products are generally more expensive than competitors’, and Zuckerberg made sure to hammer that point home.
“I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back,” Facebook’s CEO continued. “He said, ‘There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.’ “Zuckerberg put Facebook in the latter group.
Oh, and one more thing: “I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm Syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you,” Zuckerberg said. “Because that sounds ridiculous to me.”
Zuckerberg and Facebook had already been feeling the heat from all sides — politicians, advertisers, shareholders, former employees and more — in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, which put the company in the spotlight as a platform that helped spread Russian-linked disinformation and propaganda.
The Cambridge Analytica mess is just the latest major headache for the world’s largest social network, which has more than 2 billion users. Among other things, Facebook is facing lawsuits over the scandal. Also, a coalition of public advocacy groups has launched a campaign to get big tech companies — including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook — to take a “Security Pledge” to protect their users’ privacy.
“The organizations behind the campaign will encourage users to flock to services that have taken these steps and avoid those that haven’t until they do,” the groups said in a press release Monday.
In addition, Zuckerberg has been invited to testify before Congress about data privacy next week and has reportedly decided to go to Washington to do so.
Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, the CEOs of Silicon Valley’s other ad-supported tech giants, have also been invited to testify before Congress. A Twitter spokeswoman said Monday the company has no comment. Google has not yet returned a request for comment.