Author: Jack Nicas / Source: New York Times
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Hi, folks.
I’m Jack Nicas, a reporter for The Times’s bureau in San Francisco, where two of us are rooting hard for the Red Sox, to the chagrin of our boss. (Those two are me and the editor who edited this, so we slipped it in.) I cover Apple, and this past week the news out of the world’s most valuable public company was not a new gizmo or doodad, but rather a withering critique of the technology industry from one of its most prominent members.Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, rebuked his Silicon Valley peers in a speech to European officials on Wednesday, criticizing them for building a “data industrial complex” in which our personal information “is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”
As a result, he said, algorithms have magnified our worst tendencies and “rogue actors and even governments” have used our data against us “to deepen divisions, incite violence and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false.”
In one piercing portion, Mr. Cook criticized how companies like Facebook and Google — while taking care not to mention them by name — deliver personalized news feeds that lead to so-called filter bubbles and confirmation bias.
“Your profile is then run through algorithms that can serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into hardened convictions,” Mr.
Cook said. “If green is your favorite color, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles — or watching a lot of videos — about the insidious threat from people who like orange.”He continued: “We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them.”
Whew. Those are strong words, particularly from one of tech’s most powerful people.
Mr. Cook and Apple have been clear leaders in Silicon Valley in protecting user privacy. But the speech also struck some in the tech industry as self-serving.
Apple’s business model relies on people buying more iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other gadgets, many of which don’t need much user data to work well. Google, Facebook and increasingly Amazon, however, have prodigious advertising businesses…
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