During his speech a couple of days ago at the EPIC Champions of Freedom 2015 in Washington DC, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized competitors that use business models that disregard users' privacy for advertising purposes.
"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. 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 told the audience.
Cook was on-hand to receive an honor from Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit organization focusing on privacy issues, for being a corporate leader who advocates customer privacy.
While he did not name the competitors, it is obvious to some he is pointing out Google's new Photos service, which allegedly allows Google to analyze uploaded images to optimize advertising efforts. Facebook also did not escape scrutiny regarding Cook's statements.
"We don't think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we're storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices," the Apple CEO said.
"You might like these so-called free services, but we don't think they're worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for God-knows-what advertising purpose. We think some day, customers will see this for what it is," Cook added.
In response, Google updated the privacy section of its website while Facebook outlined how it was collecting user data.
The Apple chief also attacked efforts of the US government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security, go prevent data encryption which it claims allows terrorists to communicate easily.
"If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too... Removing encryption tools from our products altogether, as some in Washington would like us to do, would only hurt law-abiding citizens who rely on us to protect their data. The bad guys will still encrypt; it's easy to do and readily available," the tech giant head honcho said.
Meanwhile, a privacy activist expressed skepticism regarding Cook's statements, since Apple's its App Store distributes the apps of the makers to the iOS devices bought by its customers.
"It is encouraging to see Apple making the claim that they collect less information on us than their competitors," Privacy International's technologist Dr Richard Tynan said to BBC.
"However, we have yet to see verifiable evidence of the implementation of these claims with regard to their hardware, firmware, software or online services," he added.
Cook is known to have made similar tirades against Google and Facebook back in 2014 via an open letter to customers about privacy, and how Apple was uninterested in building profiles based on customer's internet habits and e-mail messages.
Join the Conversation