Apple takes on the internet: the Big Tech battle over privacy Tim Cook has a reputation for being soft-spoken and a little boring. His Twitter feed is replete with corporate platitudes. But when it comes to user privacy — “one of the top issues of the century” — he gets fired up. In January the Apple chief executive railed against “data brokers, purveyors of fake news . . . trackers and peddlers of division . . . hucksters just looking to make a quick buck.” Cook said that if “everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data, we lose the freedom to be human”.