Apple CEO Tim Cook has defended the company’s policy of keeping Google as the default search engine on Safari browser in exchange for billion of dollars. Cook made the comments in an interview with Axios on HBO where he was asked about Apple’s deal with Google. In public, he has criticised the data collection policies of players like Facebook and Google.
“I think their search engine is the best,” he said, but added that Apple has included many software features to prevent Google or Facebook tracking users.
“Look at what we’ve done with the controls we’ve built in…We have private web browsing. We have an intelligent tracker prevention. What we’ve tried to do is come up with ways to help our users through their course of the day,” he said.
It has been reported in the past that Apple was paid nearly $9 billion by Google in 2018 for remaining the default search engine on Safari. Neither Apple nor Google have ever publicly revealed the exact amount as part of this deal.
Cook also indicated in his interview that tech companies should perhaps prepare for regulation in the future. He told Axios that while he believed in the free market, in the case of tech it has not worked. “I think it’s inevitable that there will be some level of regulation…I think the Congress and the administration at some point will pass something,” he was quoted as saying.
The Apple CEO added that regulation in tech should not be seen as a privacy vs profits or privacy vs technical innovation issue.
Tim Cook has never really shied away from calling out other technology companies over the issue of privacy. Back in October at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners at Brussels, Belgium, Cook had called for a comprehensive federal privacy law in the US like the GDPR in Europe.
“We should celebrate the transformative work of the European institutions tasked with the successful implementation of the GDPR…It is time for the rest of the world, including my home country to follow your lead. We at Apple are in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States,” he had said.
He asked for companies to “challenge themselves to de-identify customer data or not collect that data in the first place.” He also called privacy a fundamental human right.
