Stop for a moment to imagine what being a homosexual teenager in 1970's Alabama was like. Also it's well known that his career at IBM was torpedoed over a gay "glass ceiling."
Tim Cook is a man who understands that privacy is a human right.
Stop focusing on feelings and personality.
It would be a violation of his role as Chief to lead the business on purely emotional grounds, making decisions based on his experiences growing up.
He has an obligation to return value to his shareholders.
Privacy is a Business Moat[1] for Apple, it's something they can offer to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and frankly: nothing more.
It's a clever moat because Google's moat is the actual opposite. Google says we will take your private data, reorganize it and return it to you in more useful ways. This is a powerful moat because consumers demonstrate that they like the convenience of Google's features.
Apple chose the exact opposite moat: we will respect your privacy and not run advanced intelligence against the dataset of you. It's clever because it turns a disadvantage (Google is waaaaay better at it) into an advantage (Not doing it is a good thing).
You can rationalize the calculus with feelings but that doesn't change the fact that Apple isn't a business run on emotions it's run on rational decisions, like market differentiation to create a perception of value.
So given that it's not very hard to make the arguments that standing up for privacy might be or might not be a good financial decision, why would you think the decision Tim Cook chose had absolutely nothing to do with his life experiences?
EDIT: Another comment chain had this quote from Tim Cook in a shareholders meeting that I think illustrates my point. From https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...:
""When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader."
I used to think people act completely on self-interest. Well, they do run daily for self-interest but you'll be surprised how much they want to push their "policies"/"believes". And some of them do go really long extra miles and put huge efforts.
Now, Tim Cook might be in for financial reasons. But I'll be surprised if his experiences didn't affect his decision making a LOT.
What I do know for a fact is that he is the CEO of a public company, and as such he has a duty to maximize shareholder value. This isn't a judgement of his character, it's simply a description of his job. I believe he is very capable of performing his job.
Building loyalty with both customers and employees is not something that shows up on the balance sheet every quarter, but when you have the loyalty you can do a lot more things than someone who doesn't. I'm planning to buy a macbook pro this thursday at well over $1000 over the price for similar hardware by ASUS/Acer/Lenovo etc because of the perception that Apple has the consumer in mind.
He could focus on privacy and discover that for most people it's not a big deal. Or some kind of WikiLeaks/NSA scandal could happen and people decide it's a very big deal. (Oftentime timing is everything. DoubleClick lost a third of its value because of controversies about cookies, but 10 years later Facebook went far, far, far beyond DoubleClick and their market value went up.)
He could decide that price is the most important thing and move all their operations offshore. A recession might come and it turns out low cost is the way to go. Or the economy might boom and people spend money like it's 1999.
Apple has had a pretty golden touch over the last 15-20 years, and it's hard to argue with success. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Microsoft stomped Apple and everyone else for 20 years, then went sideways for 10+ (as measured by stock market performance). But it's not like they decided to stop trying to maximize shareholder value. They just had difficulties figuring out how.
I guess I've missed hearing this. That's disappointing, especially since I've always thought of IBM as being pretty progressive in that respect.
