Zuckerberg fires back at Cook over Facebook privacy diss

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Facebook employees
It'll take a Facebook a few years to dig out of this hole.
Photo: Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken exception to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s comments that Facebook doesn’t care about its customers because it sells their data to advertisers.

Zuck went on the defensive in one of his first interviews since news broke that Cambridge Analytica leaked the personal data of 50 million users. The interview touched a number of topics, but when asked specifically about Cook’s comments Zuckerberg unleashed a tangent on why Tim Cook is wrong.

“You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth,” Zuckerberg told Vox. “The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.”

Last week, Tim Cook said that he wouldn’t be in the situation Facebook is in right now. Cook said that Apple could make a ton of money if it decided to monetize its users, but the company decided not to do that.

Although it sells customer data, Mark Zuckerberg argued that his company is actually doing something noble cause it’s trying to find a way to offer its service for free.

“I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, ‘There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.’ And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use.”

Zuck went on to say that people should be careful not to “get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you.”

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