Tim Cook Says Ads That Follow You Online Are 'Creepy' (cnet.com)

In a wide-ranging interview with MSNBC and Recode, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that everyone should know how much data they're sharing and what can be inferred about us from that information. He added that privacy "is a human right" and said he's worried about how advertisers and others can abuse access to our data. "To me it's creepy when I look at something and all of a sudden it's chasing me all the way across the web," Cook said. "I don't like that." CNET reports: The comments came as part of a wide-ranging interview between Cook, MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Recode's Kara Swisher. MSNBC broadcast the special, named "Revolution: Apple changing the world" at 5 p.m. PT on Friday. The interview was taped the day after Apple's education event in Chicago, where the company introduced a new 9.7-inch iPad and tools for teachers. The two publications released some early clips and comments from Cook over the past couple of weeks. That included remarks he made about Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cook noted that Apple purposely chose not to make "a ton of money" off its customers' data and that Facebook failed to effectively regulate itself, prompting a need for government intervention. Along with Facebook and its privacy issues, Cook talked up DACA and immigration, tax reform, the changing job landscape and the need for everyone to learn coding, among other topics.

Comments

People vote for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time you use a Facebook or Google service... that's what you vote for. Online surveillance capitalism.

Every time you allow your computer to load and run a tracking javascript from some web site... that's what you vote for.

Every time you load a "web bug"... that's what you vote for.

Every time you buy a device where someone else has more authority over it than you do, which may restrict your ability to exercise control over what the device is allowed to do... that's what you vote for.

If you've ever clicked on a banner ad, you helped us get here.

We didn't get here via foul magic, we got here because billions of people allowed things others of us see as flat out unacceptable.

Stop voting to turn the net into a shitfest of surveillance capitalism.

Tim Cook, some changes are needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite my criticisms of Tim Cook using Apple as his personal political platform, he and the company been vocal advocates of user privacy and rights. Compared to the rest of Silicon Valley and how they view users, Apple has been truly fantastic.

HOWEVER, I agree with you that here are a lot more things, some fairly simple, that Apple should be doing to back up their words with actions. Here's just a few:

1. Loosen restrictions on VPN protocols in iOS. Everyone knows the industry standard is OpenVPN, but Apple basically restricts VPN providers from implementing OpenVPN natively in their iOS apps, forcing users to resort to L2TP or IKEv2 (or set up their cknnectjkn manually using the OpenVPN app). This is cumbersome and gets in the way of good security.

2. Set StartPage as the default search engine in iOS Safari (rather than Google). StartPage returns Google results, but securely and privately. Adding DuckDuckGo a few years back was good, but most users stick with defaults and most users want Google results. So give them Google results securely and privately by making StartPage the default search engine.

3. Let alternative browsers on iOS submit DNT headers. Currently only Safari can do this. In fact, Apple needs to signicsntly lessen restrictions on alternative browsers, including letting users set a different browser as default over Safari. At least do this with browsers that have proven security credentials, like Firefox, Ghostery and Brave. But the way Apple has handled iOS browsing has been very anti-security. They took a long time to get around to fixing the HSTS supercookie bug in Safari, and then in iOS 11 created a HUGE WebRTC leak issue in most every other browser that is still unpatched. Why isn't this a priority?

4. The first four were easy; this one is going to hurt. Cook, it's time to start open sourcing some of Apple's code. The amount of simple but critical bugs found in OSX recently is insane. At the very least, start by implementing a policy that once an OS major version number is two or three years old, it's published open source. This will build trust amongst users and help researchers find bugs, while also protecting your most current developments as proprietary.

Re: Tim Cook, some changes are needed

[Anonymous Coward]

"Self-serving" makes no sense in the context in which you used it.

Also, obviously that idea would be the beginning of eventually open sourcing everything. It's a way to ease into it by open sourcing the oldest components first. The whole idea of open sourcing older components as a benefit in helping researchers find security holes clearly IMPLIES the holes may be in software still in use.

People buy Apple for a few reasons. Hardware, ease of use with the UI, and security are probably the big three. Hardware is not lessened at all by open source. The UI could theoretically be copied, but Android (for example) is COMPLETELY different and still has most of the market; there's a reason others haven't tried to even replicate Apple's basic approach, and open source is highly unlikely to change that.

Security-wise, there is an argument for staying closed source. But Apple engineers are not keeping up (at least on OSX), and eventually the benefits of open source outweigh the downsides, particularly in large projects.

Fourth, I'll also mention that open source is NOT the same as Libre/FOSS. Apple can still control the commercial use of its code with licensing terms, still centrally control everything that goes in or out of OSX and iOS, and still centrally run its App Store. It just means the code is public; that's it.

You WILL see those ads

[SuperKendall]

The point Cook is making is that even if you mute that video and close your eyes, you'll still see that same ad (or at least one for that some product) on an entirely different site. That is the creepy part, that sites across the internet suddenly seem to know what you have been looking at.

Re:Everyone does not need to learn to code

[Maxo-Texas]

I've coded in over a dozen languages from vax macro and 6502 assembly languages to cobol and fortran to ada and java.

Everyone does not need to learn to code any more than everyone needs to learn calculus or everyone needs to learn music.

I've had a computer science degree longer than some (many?) people posting on slashdot have been alive.

It's a dumb concept.

Coding doesn't teach you how to think and be a decent human being.

Philosophy and logic courses teach you how to think and be a decent human being.

And actually, learning to read music and play a musical instrument does more for you as a human being (and your ability to think) than learning to code.