Apple's Tim Cook Rebukes Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, issued a harsh rebuke of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s business model on Wednesday, saying that detailed profiles of individuals compiled by internet platforms should not exist.

“We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers, if our customers were our product,” Cook said in an interview with Recode and MSNBC that will air on 6 April. “We’ve elected not to do that … We’re not going to traffic in your personal life. Privacy to us is a human right, a civil liberty.”

The Guardian reports Cook also said that it is past time to regulate Facebook. “I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation,” he said. “However, I think we’re beyond that here.”

Facebook has received a deluge of criticism in the wake of the reporting that the personal information of 50 million American users was used by the electioneering firm Cambridge Analytica.

But Cook has been sounding the alarm on mass data collection by Facebook and Google for years. The executive has long pointed to the distinction between Apple’s business model – selling products to customers for a profit – and that of internet platforms that are “gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it”, as he said in 2015.

Cook, 57, did not have any suggestions for how Zuckerberg should address the fallout from the privacy scandal. Asked what he would do if he were Zuckerberg, Cook shot back: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”