Six Lines

Tim Cook Believes Privacy is a Civil Liberty

Posted by Aaron Massey on 16 Aug 2016.

I speculated several times about Tim Cook’s motivations for pushing privacy forward as a corporate ideal at Apple, and now it seems that Todd Frankel at the Washington Post asked him about this directly. Here’s Cook:

Privacy, in my point of view, is a civil liberty that our Founding Fathers thought of a long time ago, and concluded it was an essential part of what it was to be an American. Sort of on the level, if you will, with freedom of speech, freedom of the press.

He was asked explicitly whether “growing up gay in a red state” affected his views. Cook replied that he “wouldn’t link the two” any more than his childhood affected his other views. I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t comment on this any more than to report what he said as follow up to my speculation.