Oliver Haslam on April 3, 2018, 1:02 am

Facebook CEO Hits Back At Tim Cook’s Notion Of Not Caring About Customers If They Aren’t Charged

A war of words appears to be underway between Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Following claims by the latter that companies which do not rely on advertising for income are better off, Zuckerberg countered that argument by saying that he “find(s) that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib.”

Zuckerberg was speaking during an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, an interview that took place against a backdrop of much discussion regarding Facebook, its values, and importantly its lack of action over what now appears to have been mass data misappropriation during the 2016 US election.

Last week it was Tim Cook’s interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher that caused a stir, with Cook again stating that Apple’s privacy model is very much at odds with Facebook’s.

The ability of anyone to know what you’ve been browsing about for years, who your contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike and every intimate detail of your life — from my own point of view it shouldn’t exist.

However, Zuckerberg’s argument is that even though Facebook is a company that does not charge users for its service, unlike Apple, that does not mean that it does not “care about people.”

I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people. To the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm Syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me.

Of course, anyone who believes that either Apple or Facebook care about them is unfortunately deluding themselves. Both companies exist to make money, just as any other, and while the pair may treat users and their data differently, we should be under no illusion that either puts the needs of its customers ahead of themselves.

The full Vox interview is one well worth your time to check out, as is the one Recode held with Cook.

(Source: Vox)