Tim Cook: Being Gay is ‘God’s Greatest Gift to Me’

Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about his sexual orientation and responded that it is “God’s greatest gift” to him.

Said Cook: “I was public because I began to receive stories from kids who read something online that I was gay and they were going through being bullied, feeling like their family didn’t love them, being pushed out of their home, very close to suicide, things that just really pulled my heart. And I started saying, you know, I’m a private person, and so I kept me to my small circle and I started thinking that is a selfish thing to do at this point. I need to be bigger than that. I need to do something for them, and show them that you can be gay and still go on and do some big jobs in life, that there’s a path there. I did not do it for other CEOs to come out. I was the first, which is kind of shocking. I’m very proud of it. To me, it is God’s greatest gift to me.”

On the topic of privacy, Cook spoke at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners  in Brussels this week and called for a U.S. data protection law to protect user privacy rights.

Said Cook at the conference: “Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance.”

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