Digital Smarts - Apple, Technology and Privacy

Apple’s Chief Executive Tim Cook delivered a speech recently addressing customer privacy.  Cook criticized digital companies that gain access to our most private information in return for the technology and services we can’t do without. Of course, Apple also gathers private data for advertising, marketing and engineering purposes, but the company’s defense is that it makes their products more useful to us. Cook even stated “Apple doesn’t want your data”. Apple also places more restrictions on the use of data than other tech companies do, including its decision to encrypt your iPhone data by default in a way that makes it virtually inaccessible to the government. In his speech, though, Cook failed to discuss the enormous benefits that free, ad supported services like the Google search engine have brought to consumers worldwide. Now that the topic is on the table for discussion, how do you think the privacy of your information should be handled?