Less than 24 hours after Apple CEO Tim Cook issued an open letter opposing a judge’s order for Apple to help access a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, Google’s CEO has chimed in on the matter.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to Twitter this evening to weigh in on the situation with Apple and the FBI, saying that “forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy.” Pichai went on to say that requiring a company to hack into consumer devices and data “could be a troubling precedent” and that he’s “looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue.”
A federal judge recently order Apple to assist the FBI in accessing an iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters. The government wants Apple to disable the mechanism that would erase the phone’s data after too many failed password attempts, which would let them brute force their way into the device. Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote a letter in which he opposed the order, arguing that it would be wrong for the government to force Apple to create a backdoor into its products and that, while the government may argue that this is a one-time thing, there’s no guarantee that any backdoor created wouldn’t eventually be reused or acquired by the wrong party.
Pichai’s response isn’t as strongly worded as Cook’s, but the Google CEO does seem to be siding with Apple on the matter. What will be interesting is seeing if CEOs of other major tech companies, like Facebook and Microsoft, end up weighing in on the matter, too.