Apple has published details of requests for customer data made by police and security services and re-asserted that it hadn’t heard of Prism before it was disclosed by The Guardian and The Washington Post.
In a post on its website, the company said ‘We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order.’
Like Google and Facebook, Apple said that it had asked for permission to disclose details of requests made for user data.
From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.
The company said that it reviewed each request carefully and delivered ‘the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities.’
While Apple didn’t disclose the types of data provided, it gave examples of the data it doesn’t have access to, or doesn’t store, and therefore can’t provide.
conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.
