*By Carlo Versano* Apple CEO Tim Cook made his most forceful comments yet on the privacy concerns plaguing the tech industry, telling a conference in Brussels, Belgium that a "data-industrial complex" has led to eroding privacy rights around the world. Cook then called on the U.S. to adopt a landmark federal privacy law like the GDPR that went into effect earlier this year in the EU. Cook was delivering the [keynote](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=172&v=kVhOLkIs20A) at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. In a 20-minute address, he laid out a case for a rethinking of how privacy is protected in the digital age. "Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies," he said. "This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or crazy." Cook did not lay blame with any particular company or institution ー he mentioned "rogue" actors and "even governments" ー but he seemed to be referencing recent scandals at Facebook and Google. He criticized Silicon Valley for calling for change in public, and then working to "resist and undermine it behind closed doors." He went on to praise the GDPR law and other legislation in countries like Japan and Brazil and said: "It is time for the rest of the world, including my home country, to follow your lead." In a series of [tweets](https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1055035534769340418) that followed his address, Cook expanded on his call to action, saying "privacy is a fundamental human right." He then described the principles that he called on tech companies to follow in order to protect the data of their users. For Cook, privacy has long been a personal cause, though it's also become a savvy business strategy, and a main tenet of how Apple ($APPL) now differentiates itself among its big-tech brethren. Because the company doesn't make any serious money from advertising, which is at the root of the privacy matter, it can set itself apart from Facebook ($FB) , Google ($GOOGL) , Twitter ($TWTR), and other free services whose business models are built on the premise that they need to vacuum up huge amounts of user data in order to sell ads. Apple's pitch to customers cuts the other way: pay up big at front for our hardware, or a little bit each month for our subscription services, and we'll leave you alone. That has served the company ー and Cook ー well over the last two years, as consumers have begun to take a more skeptical eye to the way they interface with the tech companies in their lives. In Brussels, Cook amplified that strategy and his own personal concerns, exemplified in a [tweet](https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1055035534769340418) he sent afterward: "It all boils down to a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in?"
