The first customer in line, Rami Shamis, holds up his new iPad Air at the Apple Store in New York City. Getty/ Spencer Platt
Apple released on Tuesday a report of U.S. surveillance requests for user information during the first six months of this year.
Apples has said previously that it received between 1,000 and 2,000 such requests, dealing with between 2,000 and 3,000 accounts; it also admitted to giving up the goods on up to 1,000 of these accounts. Tuesday’s report gets into the gritty detail.
It includes what percentage of each country’s requests Apple complied with, and parses the requests into those about information on devices and those for information about user accounts. User accounts saw the highest rates of exposure in the Bahamas, Russia and Portugal — Apple complied with 100% of U.S. requests there, an easy task since there were no more than two per country. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Canada had the next-highest compliance rates at 75%, 75% and 65% respectively. 32 requests were made about Hong Kong, four about Taiwan, and six about Canada. For device info, Apple’s highest compliance rates are in Russia, the United States, Sweden, and Switzerland at 92%, 88%, 89% and 85%. The U.S. government made 13 requests about devices in Russia, a whopping, orders-of-magnitude-higher 3542 for the U.S., 61 about Sweden and 109 about Switzerland. (These figures exclude the 100% rates of countries Apple received a single request about).
This was the first time Apple released such a data set. It’s behind the times on this issue: Google released its most recent transparency report in December, but the earlier reports date back to early 2009. Twitter’s first biannual transparency report was published in July 2012. Microsoft also released its second report on surveillance requests on September 27; its first one saw daylight in March 2013, and included information about U.S. surveillance requests made in 2009.
Apple is part of an alliance of technology companies (including Yahoo, AOL, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others) that petitioned the U.S. National Security Agency to reform its data collection practices, and to allow the companies to disclose more information about requests they received. This alliance can be seen, in part, as the fruit of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s efforts on transparency: it has been publishing a Who Has Your Back report since 2011, which ranks internet media companies based on how much they respect the rights of those who use their service. Publishing reports about surveillance requests for user data is one of the reports judgement criteria. As the amount of data the U.S. government has access to gets more and more publicity, transparency reports could become an essential process for companies looking to win and keep users.
