Apple is ready to take its fight to protect user privacy all the way to the Supreme Court, says Eddie Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a newly-published interview with Spanish-lanugage television channel Univision News.
“We’re willing to take it wherever we have to — and such an important event needs to be settled by the Supreme Court,” Cue said.
Eddy Cue is just the latest of several top-line executives who have spoken out about Apple’s current standoff with the FBI, concerning whether or not Apple should help hack its own iPhones by creating a backdoor for iOS. Tim Cook has published an open letter on the subject, while Craig Federighi recently published an editorial in the Washington Post.
Cue doesn’t do much more than reiterate Apple’s stance on the hot-button topic, but the purpose of his interview is to help educate the public on a crucially-important issue: one that there has been plenty of (government-led) misinformation about.
To his credit, Cue does answer some difficult questions — including Apple’s message for victims of the San Bernardino shooting which sparked this most recent legal case.
“I don’t have the words to give,” Cue said in Spanish. “How can you possibly hope to comfort someone who has lost a family member due to an act of terrorism? My heart aches, just thinking about something like that happening to a member of my own family. So I understand how emotive this is, and I’m extremely sorry this should happen to anyone in the world. But that’s why we have to work to protect our devices. If we don’t do this [through encryption], it opens up terrible opportunities for terrorists and criminals who will be able to access our information.”
Cue also touches on the government’s poor record when it comes to protecting data — pointing out that it has lost more than 5 million fingerprints belonging to government employees, hundreds of millions of identification numbers, and that this problem “is happening more and more.”
In addition, he paints the scary picture that the government could conceivably one day demand access to iOS device’s cameras and microphones: something which trigger a privacy nightmare of Orwellian proportions.
The entire interview is worth reading (and please forgive any incorrect translations on my part, which are the result of my high-school Spanish and Google Translate.) You can check out a transcript here.
