Apple Shareholders Show Support For Company’s Privacy Stance
Apple ( AAPL ) investors showed their support for Apple CEO Tim Cook and his strong stance on iPhone privacy on Friday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Shareholders at the meeting, held at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, gave Cook a standing ovation, and several attendees took the floor to voice their support for the company in its legal battle with the FBI, according to media reports. “We are staunch advocates about our customers’ privacy and personal safety,” Cook said. “We do these things because they are the right thing to do.” Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, rose during the meeting to praise the company. “It’s wrong for the government to force a company to write code” that weakens security, she said. The issue is about “our safety and government overreach,” she said, according to Silicon Beat . The Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow Push Coalition thanked Cook for his efforts to fight a court order that would force Apple to hack its iPhone software, Bloomberg reported . “We oppose the unprecedented government overreach,” Jackson said. He invoked an era in U.S. history when law enforcement spied on civil rights leaders. On Thursday , Apple filed a legal motion asking a federal court in California to throw out an order it issued last week that the company help the FBI unlock an encrypted iPhone in a criminal probe. In its court filing, Apple said that the order “creates an unprecedented burden on Apple and violates Apple’s First Amendment rights against compelled speech.” The FBI wants Apple to create a special version of its iOS software that defeats the operating system’s security protections. On Feb. 16, U.S. Magistrate Sheri Pym ordered Apple to provide “reasonable technical assistance” to the FBI to unlock an iPhone belonging to Syed Farook, one of the killers in the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people on Dec. 2. The radicalized Muslim couple, described in press reports as supporters of terror group ISIS, later died in a gun battle with police. The FBI says that it wants to check his iPhone for evidence of possible accomplices and links to terrorist groups. At Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, the five remaining candidates were unified in their opinion that Apple should help the FBI in the case. The two Democratic candidates have refused to pick a side but have urged the parties to find a middle ground. The privacy vs. security debate has divided the nation. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found more support for Apple’s stance, but Pew Research Center and IBD/TIPP polls showed more support for the FBI’s stance.