Apple's Tim Cook sends a privacy bat-signal to US lawmakers
By Natasha Lomas on Oct 3 Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has today been announced as the keynote speaker at a European data protection conference taking place in Brussels later this month — at a time when US lawmakers are asking tech giants outright if they’ll support “EU-like” privacy rules to shield US consumers from platform power. For a week this month Europe’s data protection commissioners will gather to discuss the bloc’s shiny new privacy framework, GDPR, and what comes after it. They will also gather to listen to Cook talking on the theme of data ethics. It’s a topic the Apple CEO has been speaking out about publicly for years. Just this week, in an interview on US television, he couched privacy as “one of the most important issues of the 21st century” — describing it as a human right, and saying he supported “some level” of regulation, even as he professed himself “not a pro-regulation kind of person”. Privacy is too important to keep being screwed with — or screw...