Apple Releases Its Second Bi-Annual Transparency Report For 2018

• Apple’s bi-annual transparency report detailed personal data requests from governments.
• There were over 32,000 demands for user data from governments which marks a 9% increase from the previous report period.
• Germany made the most number of requests for user data with the US being a close second.

Apple releases its transparency report twice a year and the company released its second report for the year in form of an interactive page that’s available on the official website. The tech giant reveals the number of data requests it receives from governments all over the world and the new user interface for the report makes it easy to browse through all of the data. A generic PDF version of the report is also available for download.

A total of 32,342 data requests were made by governments according to Apple’s data. Germany issued 13,704 requests for data on 26,160 devices mostly for stolen devices and is the country with the greatest number of requests. The US accounted for 4,570 data requests for 14,911 devices with most of the requests being for account information and other content. There were a number of requests for identifying financial fraud as well. With FISA reports requiring a 6-month reporting delay, they are not included in the report as they would not be relevant to the timeframe covered by it.

4,177 global account requests were made which marks a 25% increase over the last reporting period. Some of the requests including iCloud data, photos, emails, device backups, calendar data, and even contacts. According to Apple, most of these requests are attributed to a fraud investigation being conducted by China.

Apple has made a number of changes to how it reports data to US authorities. The tech giant started separating request data in the report for the first time since 2014. According to the company, less than 500 National Security Letter requests were received for under 1500 accounts. Apple has always been an advocate of user privacy going as far as to block tools like GrayKey that forcibly try to extract information from iOS devices.

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