“iCloud content, as it exists in the customer’s account” can be handed over to law enforcement in response to a search warrant, Apple’s law enforcement guidelines read. While iMessages sent between Apple devices are end-to-end encrypted, preventing anyone but the sender and recipient from accessing it, not all information backed up to iCloud, Apple’s cloud server, has the same level of encryption. Despite ‘secure’ hardware, iCloud and other services pose risksīut major gaps remain, privacy advocates say. “They just naturally don’t have a use for doing analytics on people’s data in the same way that Google and a lot of other places do,” she said.Īpple’s drafted detailed guidelines outlining exactly what data authorities can obtain and how it can get it – a level of detail, the company says, which is in keeping with best practices. She noted that Apple’s business model relies less on marketing, advertising and user data – operations based on data collection. That’s because the amount of data Apple collects on its users pales in comparison with other players in the space, said Jennifer Golbeck, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland. That’s more than six times the number of law enforcement requests Apple received in a comparable time frame. In that same period, Google received 46,828 law enforcement requests affecting more than 100,000 accounts and handed over some level of data in response to more than 80% of the requests, according to the search giant’s transparency report. In the second half of 2021, Facebook received nearly 60,000 law enforcement requests from US authorities and produced data in 88% of cases, according to that company’s most recent transparency report. However, both of those companies have documented far more requests from authorities than the iPhone maker. The company’s positive response rate is largely in line with, and at times slightly higher than that of counterparts like Facebook and Google. Of those 7,122 requests, the iPhone maker challenged or rejected 261 requests. According to the company’s most recent transparency report, Apple handed over some level of data in response to 90% of the requests. In the first half of 2021, Apple received 7,122 law enforcement requests in the US for the account data of 22,427 people.
Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty ImagesĪpple receives thousands of law enforcement requests for user data a year, and overwhelmingly cooperates with them, according to its own transparency reports. Apple gave data to law enforcement 90% of the timeĪpple’s most recent transparency report indicates it only rejected law enforcement requests for data 3.6% of the time. “The more that a company like Apple can do to set itself up to either not get law enforcement requests or to be able to say that they can’t comply with them by using tools like end-to-end encryption, the better it’s going to be for the company,” said Caitlin Seeley George, the campaigns and managing director at the digital advocacy group Fight for the Future. Those fears have only grown as once protected behaviors such as access to abortion have become criminalized in many states. Experts and civil liberties advocates have raised concerns about authorities’ extensive access to consumers’ digital information, warning it can violate fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
In recent years, US law enforcement agencies have increasingly made use of data collected and stored by tech companies in investigations and prosecutions.
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But experts say that while Apple sets the bar when it comes to hardware and in some cases software security, the company could do more to protect user data from landing in the hands of police and other authorities.
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