The “privacy activist” Tim Cook’s criticism gets uncomfortable for Google and Facebook

A fascinating debate is going on between the consumer technology giants Apple, Facebook and Google. For a while Apple CEO Tim Cook has been emphasizing privacy as an important feature of Apple products. Several times he referred to the practices of major Internet firms such as Facebook and Google as the opposite of how his company would act (usually without mentioning their name). And no matter how much hypocrisy one might believe to find in Cook’s words, there indeed is a fundamental difference between Apple and the two Internet juggernauts: Apple generates the lion share of its revenue with selling high-margin premium gadgets. Google’s and Facebook’s revenue streams are almost exclusively based on advertising. Google and Facebook need to know as much as possible about their users to be able sell more ads at higher prices. There is no way to deny this. Apple is much less depended on knowing each and every user action and preference. No matter how you slice it – and Apple’s security-related privacy issues aside – Tim Cook has a point.

Most recently he used this argumentation in an interview with The Telegraph. Cook said things like this: Continue Reading