Mark Zuckerberg was in the audience at the time.
An interview from 2010 by the late Apple co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, has resurfaced following the ongoing Facebook data scandal.
In it, Jobs talks at length about data protection and privacy settings at a Wall Street Journal conference in Los Angeles, with Mark Zuckerberg actually listening from the crowd.
At the time Facebook was in the process of updating its privacy settings, whilst Google had recently been accused of downloading data sent across unencrypted Wi-Fi.
Jobs told the audience at the event how Apple take their users privacy far more seriously than their Silicon Valley competitors, saying: “As an example, we worry a lot about location in phones and we worry that some 14 year old is going to get stalked and you know something terrible is going to happen because of our phone.”
He went to give a stark warning to his rivals who at the time weren’t (and in Facebook’s case, clearly still aren’t) following the same strict procedure to help protect their user’s data.
“Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. I’m an optimist; I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data”, he urged.
Five days ago Zuckerberg was forced to issue an apology to Facebook’s two billion users, stating that “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” It has been reported that his company lost around $5 billion (£3.5 billion) in net worth in the space of a few hours due to the events of last week.
“A lot of people in the Valley think we’re really old-fashioned about this, and maybe we are, but we worry about stuff like this,” Jobs said.
Now, only eight years later, others are finally starting to catch up and worry too.
