Privacy has been a hot topic over at Cupertino over the last couple of weeks, with a well-publicised iCloud hack threatening to overshadow Apple's launch of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch.
Now Apple CEO Tim Cook has given his thoughts on the issue of online privacy, as well as government intervention, during an interview with the Charlie Rose Show. He reaffirmed Apple's money was made from selling products and not collecting data.
"Companies should be very transparent about it [privacy]. From our point of view, you can see what we're doing on the credit card thing," Cook told Charlie Rose during the interview.
"We're not in that business. I'm offended by lots of it and I think people should have a right to privacy," he said.
"More and more incidents"
Without being drawn on the subject of the Apple hack that saw thousands of celebrity images stolen from personal iCloud accounts, Cook did allow that privacy will become an even more crucial issue.
He explained that privacy, as he sees it, is going to be a very key topic over the next year or so.
"[It will] reach higher and higher levels of urgency as more and more incidents happen," he said.
Following the theft of celebrity pictures, that included shots of Jennifer Lawrence and US model Kate Upton, Apple conducted an internal investigation following which it determined there were no breaches in its system. The images were stolen following a phishing scheme based on guessing account passwords.
Cook also took a second to quash rumours that government agencies, specifically the NSA in the wake of Snowden, had any kind of back-door access to Apple's servers.
You can see the full clip below.
