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Tim Cook: Privacy Is Worth Protecting (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes from InformationWeek: In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Apple's CEO Tim Cook talks iPhones, AI, privacy, civil rights, missteps, China, taxes, and Steve Jobs -- all without addressing rumors about the company's Project Titan electric car. One of the biggest concerns Tim Cook has is with user privacy. Earlier this year, Apple was in the news for refusing a request from the U.S. Department of Justice to unlock a suspected terrorist's iPhone because Apple argued it would affect millions of other iPhones, it was unconstitutional, and that it would weaken security for everyone. Cook told the Washington Post: "The lightbulb went off, and it became clear what was right: Could we create a tool to unlock the phone? After a few days, we had determined yes, we could. Then the question was, ethically, should we? We thought, you know, that depends on whether we could contain it or not. Other people were involved in this, too -- deep security experts and so forth, and it was apparent from those discussions that we couldn't be assured. The risk of what happens if it got out, could be incredibly terrible for public safety." Cook suggest that customers rely on companies like Apple to set up privacy and security protections for them. "In this case, it was unbelievably uncomfortable and not something that we wished for, wanted -- we didn't even think it was right. Honestly? I was shocked that [the FBI] would even ask for this," explained Cook. "That was the thing that was so disappointing that I think everybody lost. There are 200-plus other countries in the world. Zero of them had ever asked [Apple to do] this." Privacy is a right to be protected, believes Cook: "In my point of view, [privacy] is a civil liberty that our Founding Fathers thought of a long time ago and concluded it was an essential part of what it was to be an American. Sort of on the level, if you will, with freedom of speech, freedom of the press."
Me: No it's not
Unfortunately, the fact that privacy is worth a lot is why so many people are trying to sell our privacy to the highest bidders.
I agree with our Founding Fathers, but they also didn't know what a germ was. Anyways... Without Privacy there is no Security. I rarely agree with Mr. Cook but I do agree with him on this, Realistically any Entity would be unable to contain a tool that exists of this caliber. I reckon that within days, maybe hours of Apple releasing a tool to assist the Feds, the tool would end up being publicly distributed and Apple would have to make a new one...and another one...ad infinum (My latin is kinda bad, I think I got that right)
Tim Cook is in bed with China.
And the FBI... can't forget the FBI. Just like Slashdot apparently.
Could we create a tool to unlock the phone? After a few days, we had determined yes, we could.
Now there's your problem. You should not be *able* to unlock it by any known means and this approach should be supported by both software and hardware design. Design a phone that you *can not* open even upon request and you've solved the problem in the best possible way.
-SR
But unfortunately that ship has sailed.
This is not about the ethics of doing something. This is about the negative press that would surround it. Never forget that Tim Cook and Apple are not your friends. The evidence of this can be found in the things they sell where they're purposefully made difficult or impossible to repair and you can't get proper schematics to self-repair. Where they sell computers as "new" for premium prices but use 6 year old hardware. Tim doesn't give two shits about ethics.
You sound very unhappy.
Freedom of thought
Freedom of speech (follows from thought)
Freedom of the press (follows from speech)
Freedom of defense (to defend speech)
Freedom of privacy
Freedom of travel
Freedom of commerce
Any others? Note: there are limits to some of these. Thought is unlimited, but it can be argued speech is not, and thus press wouldn't be either. Defense is also limited (you can't legally own certain weapons). Privacy is also limited (police can and do invade privacy with a warrant), as well as travel (can't get into Area 51) and commerce (can't sell crack on the corner).
Of course privacy is important. Of course a back door 'tool' would find its way into the open. Should Apple have supported the Feds? That is a good question.
Let's not kid ourselves though. Apple's decision was not primarily motivated by any concern for the moral dilemma. It was everything to do with maintaining corporate face; to be seen as 'the good guys' standing up to the nasty government bullies.
At the same time it was making such a play of protecting privacy, it's hoovering up as much data about you as it possibly can and selling it off to whomever it can. Advertisers, sure. But they're the relatively benign tip of the iceberg. Insurance companies, credit rating agencies, healthcare firms,... They'll all gladly pay mr cook handsomely for the gigabytes of profile that Apple holds about every user. And Apple will quite happily oblige.
So Tim, spare us the faux 'hey, we care'. Privacy only matters because you can sell it.
He sounds very realistic.
"..."The lightbulb went off, and it became clear what was right: ..."
in my world when an idea appears.. the lightbulb goes on.
I don't care for Cook personally, or Apple, or the entire Apple-sphere.
But this is one thing he and I have a meeting of the minds on.
My privacy is valuable. Which is why I'm so parsimonious doling out pieces of it. Why the hell should I have to submit five forms of identification, provide blood, sperm and stool samples, open up my financial data back to the date of my birth, get a hundred and thirteen character witnesses, etc, etc just to participate online?
Fuck that noise. I'd rather shiver in a cave in the woods.
On top of that, my privacy also protects me from theft of my identity and, theoretically, also provides protection against illegal behavior by bad actors with government credentials. Hence, it guards my freedom.
And don't tell me it never happens. It does.
If you have zero use for your freedoms, rights and liberties, by all means. Go ahead and shotgun all your data to the Internet.
But the second you (or anyone (and I mean ANYONE) else) demands that I do the same, you're going to be met with a giant "fuck you" and a fist in the face.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I don't think that there is anything in the constitution that explicitly states this. It would be nice if it were true, but it just isn't there. You might think that this would be a reasonable extrapolation from the 4th amendment and several other places, but the scope of those amendments have been so twisted and distorted over the years that any expectation of a civil right to privacy is a complete joke, given the narrow scope of that amendment and the overwhelming tendency of lawyers and judges to finely parse those words.
We don't protect ourselves by destroying Freedom. The FBI Knew there was nothing on that Phone. They wanted to set the Precident so they could unlock everyone's Phone. These invasive privacy efforts do nothing to protect private citizens from terrorist attacks. They exist to create an atmosphere of fear and social control and paranoia in our own society.
If we really wanted to stop Sunni terrorist organizations we would be relentlessly trying to level places where they are Headquartered like Raqqa.
We the [APPS] of the [APPS], in Order to form a more perfect [APPS], [COWS], [COWS], provide for the common defense of Social Justice, [COWS], and secure the [APPS] of [APPS] to [APPS] and [APPS], do ordain and establish this [APPS] for [APPS].
The Founding Fathers would be appalled to see how the use and abuse of personal information is completely subverting their Bill of Rights. You have no protection of anything if all of your personal information is already outside of your control. If Cook was sincere, then he would at least offer a business model that would profit by protecting privacy (even if it were optional). For example:
Create a privacy protecting intermediary (PPI) that would be motivated to gather and protect ALL of your personal information in accord with YOUR wishes, not just profit maximization by selling your personal data ad infinitum while also using it to ram unneeded products down your throat.
From a time-centric perspective, here is one possible implementation: You would specify how much of your time you want to spend shopping and what you want to buy, and the PPI would anonymize your personal information and preferences and merge your data into groups of similar shoppers. That shopping time would then be auctioned off to companies that want to reach those highly qualified customers. The companies would not bother you directly, but only via the PPI. Another important parameter would be how many options you want to consider. (Personally, I would always want to see at least 3 offers for any major purchase). The PPI would split the proceeds of the auction with you, but the PPI would be strongly motivated to protect your privacy to protect its own position as the middleman.
One more thing: Competition between PPIs. You should always be free to take your data to a different PPI. Yes, that means you would have the right to demand the first PPI forget that you ever existed. Different PPIs would compete based on such parameters as percentage splits of the auctions and supplementary services like REAL filtering for ALL spam. (Personally, I would be shopping for the PPI that would maximize my time efficiency, but I suspect most people would focus on the most money.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Human traits do propagate to businesses run by humans. Greed is often one of those traits. However, a desire to do good can also be one of those traits. I am not saying that we should inherently trust Tim. I am saying that we shouldn't undermine his argument by assuming that he is being insincere. Accuse him of being a hypocrite for not being concerned about other ethical problems, but the argument that he makes should be evaluated on its merits.
# make clean sig
If it's altruism, it's very selective altruism. Apple has a long and sorted history of distorting things to suit their bottom line. Generally speaking if someone is dishonest most of the time it isn't unreasonable to believe they're probably being dishonest when there is some doubt.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Apple certainly has no shortage of issues to criticize them on. But on the issue of privacy and making the iPhone backdoor-able, at least they were smart enough to know what they could not know and could not control, and to want no part of it.
And what they were smart enough to know is that no government authority, no matter how secure and authoritative it claims to be, can control all of its own people and the hundreds of places that a backdoor capability might leak or be used improperly. The FBI cannot even control leaks and incompetence within their own ranks -- what's the likelihood that a capability so valuable would remain unleaked and well-protected in their hands, even with many checks?
So I applaud Apple for at least knowing that it should not develop such a capability and instead leave it in the hands of users to choose when to make things private, out of even Apple's reach.
There have always been secrets, and people trying to foil the methods of hiding them. Time for the government to do a bit more legwork for the next move.
You fools. Apple's security and privacy are to protect the walled garden. They keep "your data" private to prevent their competition from monetizing you. They keep "your phone" secure to protect the walled garden. There is not an ounce of concern about your dignity or rights; this is 100% about greedily protecting their revenue stream.
You have it half right. Apple is corporation, which are sociopathic entities that essentially 'feed' on money. You give them more money, they grow. You cut their money, they die. People within them can influence their behavior, but only in the short term, since a company often has much going on than one person can ever track and influence, and can easily outlive a single person.
Tim Cook could 'be your friend' and it sounds like he is at least a somewhat ethical person. But even he doesn't have complete control over Apple's behavior. If he makes just one bad call, the board will kick him to the curb, so everything he does is certainly influenced how the board and stockholders feel. But similarly, even if he wanted to make Apple products non-repairable and filled with the blood of orphans and nuns, he doesn't have complete power to do so. So ascribing the things you mentioned to him, probably isn't completely accurate.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
That can only be answered with a gun. If they can crack the phone, then they can be ordered to. We cannot trust Tim Cook or anybody else to protect our privacy. All they can offer is talk, and a person's opinion just doesn't cut it. Hell, you can't even trust the recipient of your message to protect your privacy. Trust is dead, even in the most intimate long term relations the prenup is toothless. Paranoia is no longer irrational. All we can do is lie, do our best to spoof our location and identity, and hope for the best, but always expect the worst.
Actually he just sounds well-informed.
Sounds like they are in a, wait for it, sticky situation. *Bah dum duh ching*
the odd types of security flaws often found in iOS and in particular OSX, and Apple's suspiciosly long silence before fixing them, even when the fix is simple and given to them, clearly shows that they are willing to both insert and leave discovered security holes in their products because the government tells them to. The whole hard stance on privacy is a necessity to keep the sales up, and to keep all that sweet money from going to foreign competitors. Don't think for a second your Apple devices and computers are a good choice for privacy.
..that morning, Cook had stood in front of employees at Apple headquarters and held up the phone, which a staffer had hand-delivered from a store in Beijing to commemorate a notable occasion: Apple had sold its billionth iPhone.
Wait, did Tim Cook jack someone's iPhone just because it was the billionth? I can only imagine a scene similar to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
You bought the lie that Apple put in the media. Apple most certainly can unlock an iPhone, and the court order was written very deliberately to allow Apple to maintain control of the defeat device and to destroy it immediately after use. That was written both to address concerns that the device would be "in the wild" and to address concerns of abuse of such a device, as it was written in a manner so that Apple could again charge the full cost of a clean sheet design of the defeat device, which is the penultimate check on government power.
Tim, I would like more control of my iPhone so I could assure privacy myself.
a few quick examples:
- Can I use my apple phone without apple knowing who I am?
- Can I block some apps from internet access at all times (not just over cellular)?
- Can I create/adjust my own content blockers?
- Can I have a firewall, bidirectional? Please?
Tim Cook is in bed with China.
I didn't know China was gay
Are you willing to die for it? I didn't think so!
Freedom on the other hand, a whole different ball game.
Tim Cook is a pozzed up virtue signalling queer on the prowl for government cocks.
The only reason they ever bothered is that some people of means were hurt by the lack of it. They don't care about ordinary people or what happens to them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But not in China. So for a billion folks in China, oh well. If you're gay and the state isn't down with that, tough.
Tim Cook didn't leak anything. That was social engineering.
He talks privacy yet build huge cloud analysis data centers.
He really needs to step down.
No new products in years. What a failure.
From my understanding this guy is correct. The rumours go, that the guy who did the shooting deliberately smashed to pieces his personal phone and left his WORK iphone in his drawer / house or something.
I imagine law enforcement would want to check the thing but it was always likely to have very little on it.
He absolutely did leak her photos. He hates her.
you probably meant sordid
I think much more effort is required in law creation to guarantee to people that their rights will never be abused, and an agency needs to be set up to vigorously protect this and to work only on the side of individual people, and which has authority over every other department that exists.
In a free society, people must be able to experiment with ideas and thoughts. Some of these thoughts and ideas will by the very nature of the process be, to put it mildly, problematic. Other will threaten holders of power. Hence, in order to no have to self-censor, people must have privacy in the spaces they use to evolve their ideas and opinions and that is what a free society is all about. Today, these spaces are more often than reflected in the computing equipment people own.
Sure, many people do not use these freedoms or only use them rarely. That does not matter one bit. If they are missing, freedom goes out the window and tyranny sets in. And tyranny is far, far worse than any other threat could ever be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I didn't know China was gay
Me luv you long time.
Then the question was, ethically, should we?
yeah- i'm sure he wrestled with that mightily.
what he wrestled with was the financial implications. Somehow they came to the conclusion that it would cost them more money to go ahead and break into that phone- probably because they'd have to start doing it all the time.
That's how that decision got made, not because of anything soft and fuzzy like ethics.
Absolute statements are never true
I agree that it is almost certainly selective altruism, but I think that most altruism is selective in exactly the way I think you mean. But personally, Tim Cook did have a long history of being private about his personal life, having waited until a very demanding time to bring it up. The privacy issue itself came up in a very demanding time. It seems to fit him in this case. But then, I am not the best at reading between the lines, so there is that.
# make clean sig
There's something weird going on in /. Comments like yours get insta modded as "(-1) Troll". It's as if you're not allowed to have a view here differing from the "consensus".
I personally think your comment is absolutely valid. It's an opinion and I, an intelligent self-thinking being, take it as such!
Of course, I do agree with Tim Cook. But I don't believe that > much that he really does care about Apple's gullet's --uh-- user's privacy.
Just grandstanding to net in more gullets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... lol. (I laughed because privacy doesn't exist in the medium where many of our thoughts largely exist, the internet and computers in general). Nearly all of us wouldn't know if the NSA/CIA/etc... came into our computers to check on us-- from the little I know these guys have a huge amount of brain power and almost unlimited authority. And I'm sure there are a few leaps in this thought, but I'm worried that perhaps the public might conflate the FBI's inability to access that particular iPhone, you know which one, to the government in whole unable to access whatever desired information from whatever desired device/iphone/computer/IP address/Etc....
Cook wasn't able to even utter the name "privacy" in the quoted sentence?
"In my point of view, [privacy] is a civil liberty that our Founding Fathers thought of a long time ago and concluded it was an essential part of what it was to be an American. Sort of on the level, if you will, with freedom of speech, freedom of the press."
Freedom to bear Arms, Tim. Now why do you vote Democrat again?
If we really wanted to stop Sunni terrorist organizations we would be relentlessly trying to level places where they are Headquartered like Raqqa.
To what end? Every bomb we drop that happens to harm an innocent person is egg on our face in other countries eyes. It's a deadly game of whack-a-mole that really doesn't have an end.
Hate breeds more hate. The Sunni and Shiites will never be peaceful to one another, and neither will truly accept Western civilizations (e.g. US and UK) as long as we keep going in and ham-handedly killing women and children in the name of peace. Ever wonder what sparked terrorism and revenge on the West? Do you think maybe some of the Cold War proxy conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan may have something to do with it? Maybe the two gulf wars tarnished our image?
It's funny that these terrorist organizations are so hard to track because they use "ancient" technology. Bin Laden used hand-written messages and couriers to plan and coordinate. They hid in caves, not in the backs or basements of bars. They stayed away from cell phones and other devices that could be tracked and monitored. Yet we are led to believe that these "lone wolves" were only able to chat via cell phone?
We need to treat people's privacy as an immutable thing like gravity or the passage of time.
This is the problem, right here. The FBI has no respect for the Founding Fathers. Also, no respect for the citizens, privacy, freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any of it.
All of the Three Letter Agencies would take a dump on all the foundations of western freedom if it would make their lives easier, their budgets larger, and their headcount greater. It matters little if it leads to even one single terrorist (still unproven, by the way. All the spying and creepiness and not a single terrorist has been definitively caught and convicted based solely on the illegal surveillance). It's all about grabbing power while the power can be grabbed.
cooperates with every evil government on Earth, as long as there's money to be made? Cooperates with muslim countries that have official policies of murdering gays, prosecuting women who are raped, etc?
Same guy who cooperates with China and others spying on their own people and persecuting them for reading the "wrong" web sites or having the wrong political beliefs?
Same guy who backs all the leftwing politicians in the US who are always talking about raising taxes to pay for social justice and infrastructure and public services, but who has publicly instisted Apple will not bring itsmoney back into the US until the government lowers his tax rate to levels he thinks are acceptable?
The man's an evil phoney. His posturing about privacy, higher taxes on the rich, and other liberal dog whistles is just intended to keep fooling morons into thinking he and Apple are "good" and that users should be willing to mindlessly pay premium prices for Apple stuff that's very high-profit because it's made by slave labor in 3rd world hell holes where employees kill themselves out of despair, and the company's global "cred" comes in-part from cooperating from evil governments.
> After a few days, we had determined yes, we could.
Enough. What can be done, eventually will be done. Others try to secure their software, so not even they can crack it. That's the way to go, because otherwise there just need to be enough bribe or pressure and it will be done. Look at your anonymous vpn provider. They will most likely cooperate as well, turning over all their logs, which means nothing at all. That's useful security for you and for them. Now suppose they have logs but store them strongly encrypted. Then it's just a matter of a good argument to convince them to turn over the logs. And once they did it one time it's a slippery slope.
Translation: - "I care deeply about privacy because Apple's business model at present is based on selling hardware, not advertising."
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
The short of it is that Tim is scum, just like Jobs.
See, that's where you are wrong. NOBODY was scum like Jobs.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!