14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of months ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook felt it was necessary to dot the i regarding customer privacy and how Apple handles its users’ personal data in exchange for providing online services.
Apple is by no means a saint when it comes to collecting data, but the company firmly upholds that it is not doing it solely for monetization. The evidence is already there. Apple mostly sells hardware, and it doesn’t beg every customer to tell them if they’re married or not.
“You’re the product”
In an open letter posted to Apple.com in September, CEO Tim Cook said, “A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.”
Despite Cook not calling any names, this didn’t sit well with the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. A cover story on TIME magazine suggests that the Facebook CEO is upset with Cook. He doesn’t agree with the southerner’s thinking and he feels directly targeted by his claims.
He is quoted as saying, “A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it’s the most ridiculous concept. What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper!”
Defending your business model
One problem with Zuckerberg’s answer to Tim Cook’s open letter from September is that he shouldn’t have even bothered answering it. First of all, Cook said nothing about Facebook in there, nor did he target social networking per se. If anything, Cook was defending Apple’s data collecting practices in contrast with Google’s.
Second of all, Facebook’s business model is fundamentally different from Apple’s. There’s no comparison to be made here. A “frustration” is all there is, really. Zuckerberg has basically answered his own question.
Third, subjectivity doesn’t even cut it when it comes to Apple’s prices. Apple’s products are, by all accounts, expensive. Whether or not those prices are justified has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook monetizes people’s private lives. There’s no argument to be made here, plain and simple.
If anything, Zuckerberg should have stated Facebook’s intentions in the same way Cook did for Apple: “Our business model is very straightforward.”
