Tim Cook takes on tech critics

Apple CEO Tim Cook upped the ante Tuesday in his company’s long-running feud with Facebook by defending Apple’s anti-tracking privacy update, which the social media giant recently called out as a challenge to its own earnings.

During The New York Times DealBook Summit, Cook spoke in support of an Apple feature that requires apps to ask users for permission before tracking them across platforms. Facebook, along with other tech companies, have cited the anti-tracking feature as a roadblock for their businesses.

“I don’t know about estimates, I can’t testify to those kind of numbers, but I think that from our point of view privacy is a basic human right and the people that ought to be deciding whether their data shared is the person themselves,” Cook said during an interview kicking off the summit.

The Financial Times last week reported that the Apple update caused an estimated nearly $10 billion of revenue loss in the second half of the year for Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The feature was rolled out in April after delays. Facebook, which thrives off revenue from targeted ads, fiercely pushed back on the planned update, arguing in an ad campaign that it would hurt small businesses.