As Tim Cook prepares to step down as Apple’s CEO in September after 15 years at the helm, his carefully cultivated reputation as a champion of user privacy is facing fresh scrutiny. Cook famously resisted the FBI’s demands to unlock a mass shooter’s iPhone in 2015 and has called privacy “a fundamental right.” Apple reinforced this image with high-profile advertising campaigns.
But critics point to the company’s concessions to government demands abroad — particularly in authoritarian regimes — as undermining those claims. The tension between Apple’s domestic privacy posture and its international compromises is likely to define how Cook’s tenure is ultimately judged.
