Apple CEO Tim Cook: Apple requested 'zero' personal data from FacebookJune 6 (AZINS) Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the company did not request any personal data from Facebook nor did it receive any, while responding to a New York Times that stated that Facebook allowed about 60 device makers, including Apple and Samsung, to access personal information of users and their friends. The report revealed the partnerships, shedding new light on the social media giant's behaviour related to customer data in the wake of a scandal involving the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

In conversation with NPR, Cook said, "We've never been in the data business. The things mentioned in the Times article about relationship statuses and all these kinds of stuff, this is so foreign to us, and not data that we have ever received at all or requested — zero."

The New York Times report stated that social media giant Facebook, which was founded in 2004, reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers including Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials were quoted as saying by the report. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, "like" buttons and address books.

The agreements that Facebook entered raise "concerns about the company's privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree" with the Federal Trade Commission, the report said. Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users' friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.

In interviews to The New York Times, Facebook however defended its data sharing agreement and asserted that these are consistent with its privacy policies, the FTC agreement and pledges to users.

The report comes as Facebook has come under scrutiny for its handling of private data after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica accessed millions of users' private information. In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had admitted making a "huge mistake" as personal data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.