Apple said yes to 25,829 government requests to access customers’ devices

“National governments demanded access to 163,823 Apple devices in the first half of 2018, according to new figures released by the company,” Laurence Dodds and Olivia Feld report for The Telegraph. “The latest Apple transparency report showed that it received 32,342 requests to access the contents of iPhones, iPads and other gadgets, a 9 percent increase from the second half of 2017.”
“The tech giant granted 80 percent of requests for data worldwide,” Dodds and Feld report. “The UK made 572 requests, of which 77pc were deemed legitimate, while the biggest requesters were Germany, with 13,704, and the USA, with 4570. The company does not disclose which government agencies requested access.”
“On average, 73 percent of the requests to access devices were approved, but there was wide variation across countries. Britain’s rate of 77 percent was behind Sweden’s at 85 percent, but ahead of Turkey, where journalists and political dissidents are experiencing a wave of repression and where only 53 percent of requests were approved,” Dodds and Feld report. “China, where Apple has been criticised for storing its users’ data on a state-run server which might be accessible to government agents, had a surprisingly high approval rate at 94 percent. Apple said the numbers were driven in part by a high number of stolen device investigations in Germany, Finland and South Korea and by large insurance fraud investigations in China.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s latest Transparency Report, which covers January-June 2018, is here.