Tim Cook later followed suit as CEO, calling privacy a
"fundamental human right" in an NPR interview.
"Our view on this comes from a values point of view, not from a commercial interest point of view. Our values are that we do
think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products. We don't collect a lot of your data and understand every detail about your life. That's just not the business
that we are in."Mark Zuckerberg has mostly remained mum on the topic, and when he does, he likes to use the word "control" instead of "privacy." In a
Time interview six years ago, he said what people want isn't complete privacy or secrecy, but "control over what they share and what they don't."
In 2009, Google's
then-CEO Eric Schmidt uttered the famous line, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first
place.”
Since then, Alphabet's CEO Larry Page has taken a more PC approach, emphasizing user choice at a 2014 TED conference: "I think the main thing we need to do is
just provide people choice. Show them what data’s being collected, their search history, location data."
So how can targeting and consumer privacy strike a balance that
everyone likes? It seems that, like all things having to do with marketing, the consumer's wants and needs are at the core. And there are many needs, beginning with understanding who is doing
the tracking.
“I have no idea how I’d investigate what info is collected about me in places like Google and
Facebook, other than the information I’ve provided them, such as my profile info,” one survey participant said in Pew's study released this year.That
person isn't alone; a 2015 Pew study found 37% of respondents felt they
have “not much control" over the amount of information collected about them and how it is used.