Apple CEO Tim Cook Blasts Facebook’s Privacy Breach: “I Wouldn’t Be In This Situation”

Apple CEO sat down with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Recode’s Kara Swisher in the forthcoming special Revolution: Apple Changing the World to talk about many issues including immigration and the beauty pageant search for Amazon’s next HQ, but Facebook’s recent troubles with data and privacy took center stage.

As he sat with Hayes and Swisher at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, IL, Cook wasn’t shy with his words when it came to what he would do in Mark Zuckerberg’s position. “What would I do?  I wouldn’t be in this situation,” he said.

Zuckerberg and his popular social media platform have been under fire since reports that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm advising the Trump campaign, had gained unauthorized access to millions of users’ personal information. He has since made an apology for the misuse of personal data belonging to millions of users of the social network and talked about the steps the company will take to safeguard users’ privacy. In the videos below, Cook gives his opinion about online privacy and talked about how Apple is careful with their app star saying, “we do carefully review each app and police now.  And we don’t subscribe to the view that you have to let everybody in that wants to or if you don’t, you don’t believe in free speech.”

He goes on to admit that Apple could “make a ton of money if we monetized our customer.” He follows that with: “We’ve elected not to do that.”

He says that if a consumer buys any of their products, Apple will make a little bit of money. He adds, “But you are not our product.”

As Facebook continues to get blasted for its privacy snafu and the #DeleteFacebook campaign rages on, Cook insists that Apple will not “traffic your personal life.”

“I think it’s an invasion of privacy. I think it’s – privacy to us is a human right,” he said. “It’s a civil liberty, and in something that is unique to America, this is like freedom of speech and freedom of the press and privacy is right up there for us. And so, we’ve always done this. This is not something that we just started last week when we saw something happening. We’ve been doing this for years.”

Revolution: Apple Changing the World airs at 8 PM ET, April 6 on MSNBC.

Watch the videos from the special below.