Apple CEO Lambasts Government, Facebook Over Civil Liberties 'Attacks'

In what has been described as a “blistering” attack, Apple CEO Tim Cook lashed out against government spying and the “gobbling up” of information by Silicon Valley rivals Facebook and Google during an award ceremony on Monday evening.

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” Cook said in a remote address before Electronic Privacy Information Center’s (EPIC) ‘Champions of Freedom’ event in Washington, D.C.

Cook was being honored for ‘corporate leadership’ by the civil liberties group. Of certain tech companies, Cook said “they’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong.”

“We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy,” he added. “The American people demand it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it.”

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As TechCrunch reports, though not thinly veiled, the comments were directed at companies “like Facebook and Google, which rely on advertising to users based on the data they collect from them for a portion, if not a majority, of their income.”