War of words between Apple, Facebook bosses
03 Apr 2018
The war of words between the heads of Apple and Facebook has worsened with both the top bosses indulging in heated exchanges in various media interviews.
Apple CEO Tim Cook (left) and Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, describing his comments about his company as ‘extremely glib.’
“If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford,” remarked Zuckerberg in an interview with Vox, the general interest news site.
“At Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use. I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people.”
Cook in an interview with Recode, the technology website, had declared, “The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetised our customer — if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that.”
According to him, he would never be in Zuckerberg’s current situation, where he is facing criticism for the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Facebook has been criticised for allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest data from about 50 million of its users and for stating that it had relied on the political consultancy’s claims that it had deleted the information.
Cook said that Apple could have made lots of money if it had monetised its customer. “We've elected not to do that,” he said. “Privacy to us is a human right.”
But Zuckerberg rubbished Cook’s views as insincere. “You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth,” he said.
Facebook, which is free, believed in connecting people. “Having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people,” he pointed out.