Tim Cook: 'Sacrificing our right to privacy can have dire consequences'

At the Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection held at Stanford University, President Obama pushed for more public-private collaboration and information sharing to allegedly prevent hacks such as the breaches suffered by Home Depot, Target and Anthem. While that doesn’t sound bad, actions such as outlawing encryption – as if only terrorist or pedophiles use it – and providing law enforcement with backdoors into software sounds terrible. Any backdoors left open will also be exploited by cyber bad guys. An unnamed technology executive called it “a stupid approach.”

The top dogs from tech companies were invited to the summit as well as to a private lunch with President Obama, but Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo CEOs snubbed the invitations.

The President admitted to Re/code that Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s mass data collection “were really harmful in terms of the trust between government and many of these companies, in part because of the impact it had on their bottom line.”