Apple CEO Tim Cook said his company is actively reviewing and monitoring apps in the App Store to make sure they don’t put people at risk of having their personal data stolen.
“We’re always looking at improving and raising the bar,” he told MSNBC in an interview that’s set to air in full Friday night. “But we do carefully review each app and police now. And we don’t subscribe to the view that you have to let everybody in that wants to or, if you don’t, you don’t believe in free speech.”
Cook delivered that answer after he was asked how his company is responding to incidents like the breach of data from as many as 87 million people through Cambridge Analytica. When asked what he would do if he were in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s situation right now, Cook responded, “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Cook likened the App Store to a corner store, where what is sold in that store is a reflection of the person who owns the store.
“What you sell in that store says something about you, and if you don’t want to sell that other thing, you don’t sell it,” Cook said. “It doesn’t mean that you can’t use an iPhone to go to your browser and go to some porno site, if you want to do that … but I’m just saying that it’s not what we want to put in our store.”
“We’re looking at every app in detail. What is it doing, is it doing what it’s saying it’s doing, is it meeting the privacy policy that they’re stating, right?” Cook said in the interview, which MSNBC has titled, “Revolution: Apple Changing the World.”
