Tim Cook: "I fear deeply the loss of privacy"

What you need to know

• Apple CEO Tim Cook has decried customers losing their privacy to big tech.
• He warned that if users lose their privacy they will change their behavior and become more restrained.
• He made the comments at a TIME100 event.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned that he deeply fears the loss of privacy to big tech for users around the world and says that it could cause people to become more restrained in their behavior.

Cook made the comments at the TIME100 Summit this week, in which he told executive editor John Simons "I fear deeply the loss of privacy."

"If we begin to feel that we're being surveilled all the time, our behavior changes. We begin to do less. We begin to think about things less," Cook said. "We begin to modify how we think. In a world like that where we're restraining ourselves, it changes society in a major way."

He also stated that it was difficult to argue that people shouldn't own their data, and that no company "should be able to step in and on an uninformed basis vacuum up your data."

Cook said that he worries that if people feel they are being surveyed and have less privacy they will become more restrained and change the way they think and behave. Apple continues to make big pushes in terms of privacy, its new best iPhone software iOS 16 features a new Safety Check feature that lets users quickly take action if they believe their personal safety is at risk from a domestic or intimate partner. The feature includes an emergency reset to help users quickly sign out of iCloud and reset privacy permissions, as well as preventing messages from being sent from devices they don't have in hand.

The first beta of iOS 16 is available for developers to download now, you can see everything Apple announced at WWDC 2022 here.