美国国家公共电台 NPR Apple Requested 'Zero' Personal Data In Deals With Facebook, CEO Tim Cook Says

 

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep in San Francisco. Just south of here yesterday, the CEO of Apple took the stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLE WORLDWIDE DEVELOPER CONFERENCE)

TIM COOK: Good morning.

(APPLAUSE)

COOK: Good morning.

INSKEEP: Tim Cook had reason to be cheerful. He runs the world's most valuable company worth close to a trillion dollars. He was addressing software developers, promoting new features to the operating systems of the iPhone and the iPad and the Apple Watch.

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLE WORLDWIDE DEVELOPER CONFERENCE)

COOK: Changing the world and making it a better place is what it's all about for us.

INSKEEP: That's the motto for much of the tech industry, though it faces unprecedented¹ questions about whether the industry really is making the world better. Apple's shareholders² recently warned of growing societal unease about the mental health effects of too much phone use. So now Apple says a new feature will make it easier to track what you or your children have been doing on a device.

COOK: So you know how much time you're spending, where you're spending it, how many times per hour you're picking up a device, how many notifications you get, who's sending those to you.

INSKEEP: That's how Tim Cook described it when he sat with us after his speech.

What, if anything, bothers you about the amount of time people are spending on your phones?

COOK: Well, if you back up and think about what we're about, we've never been about maximizing usage of our devices. It's never been a focus of ours. There's clearly users out there that are worried about the amount of time they're spending, or the amount of distraction³ or interruptions they get.

INSKEEP: I want to ask about your thinking, though, because you could say, I'm responding to demand and there's some shareholders that wanted this, but are you actually bothered? Are you actually concerned by the possibility that what you argue is a social good could be a social detriment⁴?

COOK: I think there are cases in life where anything good used to the extreme becomes not good. And so I think you can depend on your device so much and spend so much time on certain apps or pick up your phone so many times during the day that this is no longer good.

INSKEEP: But this was literally⁵ your ambition as a company, right, to make sure that people use everything?

COOK: No. That's the interesting thing. We're in a very unique position because we had never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of hours that you use it...

INSKEEP: But you maximize the number of things you can do with it. That's for sure.

COOK: We do that, yes, because we want it to be an incredible device for you. And so, you know, we've provided a way for you to have health information on it, financial information, you can pay with it. But if you're getting bombarded by notifications all day long, that's probably a use of the system that might not be so good anymore.

INSKEEP: Is there a little bit of conflict that you have to think about because you are offering people ways to limit their screen time while speaking to this giant conference of thousands of people, developers, who are in business to go sell products through your app store that would encourage people to use the phone more?

COOK: No. I don't see it as that because we always put the user at the center. And so our question is always, what is in their best interest?

INSKEEP: Do you agree with people who use the word addiction⁶, talk about addiction to smartphones?

COOK: I'm not a clinician, and so I don't know. What I do know is that you can use something too much. And I'm concerned about it. But what we want to do is provide you great tools so you can make a judgment⁷ for yourself.

INSKEEP: You also made some news by announcing some changes to your Web browser⁸ and elsewhere, which you say will make it more difficult for outside parties to track what you do online, to track your data. Are you deliberately⁹ making your platforms more hostile for companies that do business like Facebook, which was mentioned in your presentation?

COOK: We're not targeting any single company. We're targeting a practice of people collecting information without the vast majority of users knowing that it's being collected. We think that when a person leaves one website and goes to another and another and another, they do not have a reasonable expectation that that original website is still following their every move. And so we want to do what we can do there to try to prevent that. But we're not taking the ability of if somebody, you know, is on the NPR app, we think it's fine that, in rational, that NPR knows that person is there and knows something about them, assuming the user has elected to share that. What we don't think is, when you leave there, we don't think that the surveillance engine should stay.

INSKEEP: I want people to know that you have emphasized that your company does not intend to make money off of data mining, does not intend to make money off of advertising¹⁰. You make money by selling hardware. But you're addressing a developers conference here, where theres a lot of app developers who may well rely on advertising, who may well rely on data.

COOK: Well, let me let me correct something you said there. We don't believe there's anything wrong with digital advertising. It's a key part of people's business models, and we think it's perfectly¹¹ fine. It's the crafting of a detailed¹² profile, and tracking you in places where you don't reasonably expect to be tracked and companies gathering¹³ information well beyond what you would have voluntarily shared if you knew what they were doing.

INSKEEP: Is there a better business model than the business model that lots of companies are using?

COOK: Again, on the digital - we have no issue with digital advertising.

INSKEEP: Excessive data tracking, you do have an issue.

COOK: It's the collection of information beyond what the person is fully¹⁴ and completely aware is taking place and the building of this detailed profile. I think that steps over a boundary.

INSKEEP: That's some of our talk with Apple CEO Tim Cook here in California. We're hearing him throughout the morning. NPR digital culture correspondent Laura Sydell was with us for that talk and is with us now. Hey, Laura.

LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE¹⁵: Good morning.

INSKEEP: So we heard Apple pushing back on Facebook there, but just a couple days ago there was this story suggesting that Apple in some cases has been in league with Facebook.

SYDELL: That is right. As a matter of fact, what was reported was that Facebook made it possible for the hardware manufacturers like Apple or Samsung to essentially¹⁶ get all kinds of personal information off their app, including your friends and your friends' personal information.

INSKEEP: OK. That's what the story said. What did Tim Cook say?

SYDELL: Tim Cook says we could have done it, but we didn't do it. All we did was try to make things more convenient so that maybe you could post something to - you could post a photo on Facebook, and that's about it. They are not in the business, as he said, of getting users' data.

INSKEEP: Although they are working pretty closely with Facebook, as you see from examples...

SYDELL: Yes. And, in fact, a lot of these apps do it. So even though they are not doing it, the apps in their app store may very well be involved in it.

INSKEEP: NPR's digital culture correspondent Laura Sydell this morning talking about her interview with Apple's Tim Cook.

1 unprecedented   

adj.无前例的，新奇的

参考例句：

• The air crash caused an unprecedented number of deaths.这次空难的死亡人数是空前的。
• A flood of this sort is really unprecedented.这样大的洪水真是十年九不遇。

2 shareholders   

n.股东( shareholder的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The meeting was attended by 90% of shareholders. 90%的股东出席了会议。
• the company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders 公司对股东负有的受托责任

3 distraction   

n.精神涣散，精神不集中，消遣，娱乐

参考例句：

• Total concentration is required with no distractions.要全神贯注，不能有丝毫分神。
• Their national distraction is going to the disco.他们的全民消遣就是去蹦迪。

4 detriment   

n.损害；损害物，造成损害的根源

参考例句：

• Smoking is a detriment to one's health.吸烟危害健康。
• His lack of education is a serious detriment to his career.他的未受教育对他的事业是一种严重的妨碍。

5 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。

6 addiction   

n.上瘾入迷，嗜好

参考例句：

• He stole money from his parents to feed his addiction.他从父母那儿偷钱以满足自己的嗜好。
• Areas of drug dealing are hellholes of addiction,poverty and murder.贩卖毒品的地区往往是吸毒上瘾、贫困和发生谋杀的地方。

7 judgment   

n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见

参考例句：

• The chairman flatters himself on his judgment of people.主席自认为他审视人比别人高明。
• He's a man of excellent judgment.他眼力过人。

8 browser   

n.浏览者

参考例句：

• View edits in a web browser.在浏览器中看编辑的效果。
• I think my browser has a list of shareware links.我想在浏览器中会有一系列的共享软件链接。

9 deliberately   

adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地

参考例句：

• The girl gave the show away deliberately.女孩故意泄露秘密。
• They deliberately shifted off the argument.他们故意回避这个论点。

10 advertising   

n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的

参考例句：

• Can you give me any advice on getting into advertising? 你能指点我如何涉足广告业吗?
• The advertising campaign is aimed primarily at young people. 这个广告宣传运动主要是针对年轻人的。

11 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

12 detailed   

adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的

参考例句：

• He had made a detailed study of the terrain.他对地形作了缜密的研究。
• A detailed list of our publications is available on request.我们的出版物有一份详细的目录备索。

13 gathering   

n.集会，聚会，聚集

参考例句：

• He called on Mr. White to speak at the gathering.他请怀特先生在集会上讲话。
• He is on the wing gathering material for his novels.他正忙于为他的小说收集资料。

14 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

15 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

16 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。