Tim Cook on Why It's Time to Fight the Data-Industrial Complex

 

It has become relatively common for tech observers and even regular everyday citizens to warn about the insidious threats poised to society by technology companies run amuck. But those warnings rarely come from the top of the industry, and even more rarely do they come from someone as powerful and influential as Apple CEO Tim Cook. But on Thursday morning, Cook joined the CPDP Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels to give a surprisingly blunt and direct speech decrying the emergence of what he called “the data-industrial complex.”

In what was widely interpreted to be a reference to Facebook and other Apple competitors (none of which he named), Cook described a vast and opaque industry that has arisen around the capture of massive amounts of personal data, often without the knowledge of users, which is then aggregated and monetized and —at times — used for nefarious ends. This practice, Cook said, “degrades our fundamental right to privacy first, and our social fabric by consequence,” and contributes to an ecosystem full of “rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms.” It is a world, as he put it, referencing a now nearly-ubiquitous idea in tech criticism, in which you are no longer the customer, but the product.

Cook also highlighted two new Apple features. The first is what the company is calling a “privacy nutrition label” — a section on App Store product pages that explains every app’s privacy practices, including what they do with your data. The second, already more controversial, is App Tracking Transparency, a feature that will require apps to get permission before tracking your data, and which will become mandatory in the very near future. ATT, as Apple calls it, has been hailed by privacy advocates around the world as a welcome step in the effort to shore up individual rights against a massive and sometimes unscrupulous tech industry; it has also been harshly criticized by some of Apple’s competitors, like Facebook, which continues to rely on some degree of tracking to target the advertising it sells. In a December full page ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, Facebook alleged that “these changes will be devastating to small businesses” who depend on tracking-based advertising to build their brands and sell their products. (Needless to say, Apple disagrees.)

At the center of all this is Cook, who gave his speech in a suit and tie, but had already replaced them with a cozy looking vest when we spoke, less than an hour later. Over video chat, Cook is mild-mannered and earnest; he began and ended our conversation by throwing up the peace sign, in greeting and farewell. But he’d also begun the day by castigating, in harsh and unsparing language, unnamed “purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division” and lamenting the loss of “the freedom to be human” — not exactly stock or safe CEO speechifying. “A social dilemma,” he said, “cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.” During our conversation, we talked about the principles and trade-offs behind Apple’s push for greater privacy for its users, and just how dire the situation is around data harvesting and its effect on our social fabric; we also talked about whether Tim Cook is as addicted to his iPhone as the rest of us are to ours.

GQ: I thought we could start with your speech this morning: I was struck by the vehemence of it. You talked about “Rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms.” You talked about the degradation of our very social fabric. This isn't normally the kind of thing you hear from a CEO of a major company. I'm curious what brought you to this point, to speak with that kind of urgency?

Tim Cook: Yeah, I've probably never been a normal CEO. That's probably good to point out from the word “go.” I feel that way, Zach. I feel very much that we're in a situation today where the internet's become too dark a place. It can be so empowering. And yet what has happened is the tracking sort of without our consent — I don't mind tracking with consent — but I think too many people are just tracking [without our consent], and people either are not aware of it, or they're not aware of the extent of it. And so what we're trying to do is sort of bring it back to people, and give people the power, give people the choice. Because you can see what happens when that's not the case.

I’m curious about exactly that: what happens when we don’t get to choose what happens to our data. Obviously Apple talks a lot about privacy as a value, but what exactly do we have to be worried about? Is there an example that you could give of the kind of alarming stuff you are seeing as a result of what you call the data industrial complex?

Here's one that I think is not well understood, but that your reader might be interested in: Think about for a moment, if you all of a sudden find out that you're being surveilled every moment of the day. Your online life is being surveilled. And if somebody develops a 360 degree view of that, what is going to happen to your behavior over time? You're going to restrict it. You're going to begin thinking, Well, I don't really want somebody to know that I'm exploring that, or looking at that, or investigating that. And you're going to restrict and restrict and restrict. And who wants to be in that world where we're self-censoring ourselves in such a mass way across society that you wind up with people that are thinking less, feeling less, doing less? This is not an environment any of us wants to be a part of. And I worry that that's where we're currently headed.

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