China has not targeted Apple in the trade war with the United States

China has not targeted Apple at all in the ongoing trade dispute between Beijing and Washington, according to CEO Tim Cook.

"Honestly, the Chinese have not targeted Apple at all, and I do not foresee that, honestly," Cook said in an interview with CBS News on Tuesday. and how long consumers spend on their iPhone.

In an increasingly intense trade war between the world's two largest economies, China on Saturday increased tariffs on $ 60 billion worth of US goods. Beijing's decision came in retaliation for President Donald Trump's decision to raise tariffs on the $ 200 billion Chinese imports.

A 25% rate on an iPhone could potentially raise the price of the smartphone by more than one hundred US dollars, which would make these devices much more expensive in China in yuan.

Cook told CBS News that while such a scenario would certainly drive down sales, he "did not expect that to happen".

"I know that people think that the iPhone is made in China. The iPhone is assembled in China. The truth is that the iPhone is made everywhere," he told CBS. News. "And so, a tariff on the iPhone would hurt all these countries, but whoever would suffer the most would be this one."

Cook also told CBS News that he was worried about the impact of the fake news as well as the existence of detailed information about the netizens.

Technology companies such as Facebook and Twitter have been subject to increased scrutiny in recent years because of their role in spreading misinformation and hate speech.

For its part, Apple is "not an amplifier for false information or to pit groups against each other," Cook told CBS News. He added that Apple News, the company's news aggregation service, relies on people, not machines, to manage information.

Confidentiality was an important theme at Apple's annual Apple Developer Conference on Monday. The tech giant has announced an option called "Connect with Apple" that can be added to applications, allowing users to log in without having to create a separate user name and password.

Apple said the service did not collect any personal data and that users had the ability to scramble their email addresses so that a third party could never store them.

"We see privacy as a fundamental human right," Cook told CBS News. "There is an extraordinary amount of detailed information about people that I believe should not actually exist, are available today."

Read the transcript of CBS News' extended interview extracted from Cook's interview here.

– Steve Kovach of CNBC contributed to this report.