"We are the company that doesn't want your data," said the Apple CEO, in a
"blistering" speech interpreted as an attack on Google and Facebook.
"Some of the most prominent and successful companies (in Silicon Valley) have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information," Techcrunch reported Cook as telling an audience in Washington. "They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be."
"We at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security," Cook said. "We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it."
I've been wondering how long it would be before Apple would more explicitly begin to sell privacy. However bad it might sound, it says worse things about the other firms that Apple can turn user privacy into a competitive advantage.
For those among us who want privacy but aren't particularly tech-savvy, what are the credible alternatives to the proverbial "least-evil tech giant?"
