TOBY SHAPSHAK: Tim Cook’s rallying cry shouldn’t be ignored
Apple’s CEO warns that the exploitation of personal data has reached crisis level and it’s time to fight back
Perhaps because it was Apple CEO Tim Cook sounding the alarm about how our personal data "is being weaponised against us with military efficiency" that the warning was all the more ominous. Cook, the longtime Apple insider who took over from Steve Jobs, shares his predecessor’s concern for privacy, which is rare in a world of tech companies that make money from their users. Facebook, Google, YouTube and to a lesser extent Twitter exploit users’ data to sell advertisers access to them. Instead of buying a product (a phone or a software program) people are buying a service and paying for it with their personal data. We know this from Facebook’s ongoing attempts to shore up its amorphous privacy standards and the abandon with which firms like Cambridge Analytica could exploit them. But Cook is the king of big tech, even if there are still debates about how innovative Apple is under him. At a data privacy conference in Brussels, headquarters of the EU — which has introduced brilliant us...
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