Tim Cook Says Apple Has Never Shared Data: “You’re Not Our Product”

Tim Cook Says Apple Has Never Shared Data: “You’re Not Our Product”

As part of Apple’s ongoing glasnost campaign, Tim Cook was on Charlie Rose last Friday. Part two airs tonight, and it looks like it will be a lot meatier, just based on the clip released today: Cook will apparently talk more about the role of privacy at Apple, including their choice not to release or mine user metadata.

“When we design a new service, we try not to collect data,” Cook says in regards to how they structured Apple Pay to protect delicate user information like credit card numbers. “We’re not reading your email. We’re not reading your iMessage. If the government laid a subpoena on us to get your iMessage, we can’t provide it. It’s encrypted and we don’t have the key.” He goes on to slam other tech companies for handing over information to the government, seeming to particularly point a finger companies like Yahoo, which was supposedly coerced into joining PRISM. No one has ever been granted access to Apple’s data, says Cook. “We would never do that. They would have to cart us out in a box before we would do that.”

Now this is the kind of Cook Straight Talk™ we want to see.


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