Dilemmas Faced By Tim Cook

The various dilemmas faced by Tim Cook has been characterized as,“the dirty-hands problem”;an expressionwhich referred to the hard, moral choices involving the“right-versus-right” dilemmas faced by management. The case study categorizes various responsibilities of the management into 4 different spherescalled as, “The Four Spheres of Managers’ Commitment”; a clash between which resulted into the various dilemmas for Mr. Cook. These four spheres of commitment include the following: •The Commitment of private life: It refers to commitment to various abstract, universal principles on individual level like one such maximfollowed by Mr. Cook i.e. “To whom much is given, much is required”. •The Commitment of economic agents: This refers to their
Naikgovernment agencies, labour unions, or —through strategic alliances —with customers, suppliers, and even competitors.”A clash between these responsibilities led to the major dilemma for Mr. Cook to either compromise on customer privacy by building the backdoorin order to favour national security and the right to live in a worldincreasingly threatened by international terrorismthat operated across the seamless borders afforded by digital technologyor choose to stick his business personal commitment to preserve customer privacy since once the backdoor was created or even if a way to bypass the encryption was given out even to the government, there was guarantee that it wouldn’t be used by any other malicious user. It would put privacy of numerous customers in danger. Both causes had their own noble intentions,but a choice had to be made between themthus,causing the dilemma.Q2. Assess theways in which Tim Cook may have resolved these dilemmas.Answer. Mr. Tim Cookcould have resolved the dilemma by either agreeing to creating the backdoor for the government or providing them with the information to bypass the encryption implemented for security reasons. By doing so he could have had successfully continued to maintain his commitment as an Economic agent, Company leaderbut this could have contradicted his commitment of Private Life, responsibilities outside the firm’s boundaries that he is expected to execute. Sure, itwould have had temporarily helped the government
Naikon the long-run this would have ended up being just another tool for the malicious users. The other way is what Mr. Tim Cook actually did i.e. to provide maximum support to the government on case to case basis but refuse to provide a backdoor or any information to bypass the securitythus,maintaining customer privacy. I believe Mr. Tim Cook took a wise, appropriate decision.He even so far as to update the security in the newer OS’s so that even his own engineers could not bypass the security anymore.This helped him maintain his commitment of Private Life, his responsibilities towards his customers (which is considered outside Firm’s boundaries as per the case study). Q3. Last yearSenatorsFeinstein and Burr released “Backdoor” Anti-Encryption Bill. Review the draft online and provide your insights.Answer. The Anti-Encryption bill called as “Compliance with Court Orders Act”was introduced by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) (who represents California, where most of the companies that would be impacted are based) inthe month ofFebruary 2016as a result of increasingly rancorous debate over encryptionbetween the government agencies like FBI and the tech companies like Apple. If this bill was passed, it would have had requiredtech firms to decrypt customers’ data at a court’s request, essentiallyrequired theengineers to make their encryption reversible for investigators, create vulnerabilities into their products or servicesalso,potentially