• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, June 11, 2015

The 68th annual Tony Awards, established to celebrate excellence in the theater, took place on June 7, and were a roaring success. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” took home five awards, including best play and best male lead. “Fun Home” took home another five. Even “The King and I” -- yes, it’s back on Broadway -- landed a few.

But there was one performance that didn’t receive anywhere near the honor and prestige it should have: Tim Cook’s speech, just a few days earlier, slamming Google and Facebook for not respecting your privacy nearly enough. As TechCrunch recounts, "I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be."

I suppose the speech made sense in context -- he was, after all, being honored as a “Champion of Freedom” by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Patting yourself on the back while reinforcing your privacy credentials seems only appropriate.

And yet, according to the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Apple is part of the PRISM program, which allows the government direct access to the company’s servers.

Never you mind, says Cook. We share less info than Google and Facebook because we collect less info than Google and Facebook, therefore we have less info to share.

And yet, as Ben Thompson points out, the difference in data collection strategy -- the reason Apple has less info to share -- is not a function of benevolence, but of business model.

“Apple’s mission is to make the greatest products on earth,” says Thompson. “Google (‘Organize the World’s Information’) and Facebook (‘Make the World More Open and Connected’) have different mission statements, and that’s great… Note, though, that while Apple’s mission is deep -- make the best products (but not all of the products), both Google’s and Facebook’s are broad: all the world’s information, and all the world’s people, respectively… [T]hese missions dictate that Google and Facebook both be free: that’s the only way to gain the critical mass of people necessary to allow both company to accomplish their missions. And, if your service must be free, your business model must be advertising.” (Emphasis mine.)

So Cook is championing freedom -- but only for those who can afford it, and only for the services we’re willing to pay for. Nobody’s willing to pay for search. It’s not just a question of mission; it’s also a question of perception of value.

And yet, ultimately, Apple is just as good and and just as bad a company as the others, offering products of great beauty and intense usefulness, transforming the way we approach our personal devices and our user experiences, and repeatedly encountering challenges (such as managing the supply chain so that workers aren’t subject to inhumane conditions) that it needs to address in order to live up to the level of integrity a company of this stature should have.

Like many large companies, Apple does extraordinary things and things that are not so extraordinary. To claim the moral high ground and point the finger at those who are, in many ways, just like you, takes a lot of chutzpah.

So Cook should have won an award.