Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, it said in a statement on its website, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters.
The most common form of request, the company said, 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.
In the wake of the revelation that the US government is monitoring the chatter coming from web and mobile applications under an initiative known as Operation PRISM, several companies that were implicated in the matter have issued denials that they have been turning over wholesale customer information in the name of national security. Apple said that the latest figures should reassure its customers that it is keeping their information safe.
“Two weeks ago, when technology companies were accused of indiscriminately sharing customer data with government agencies, Apple issued a clear response: We first heard of the government’s PRISM program when news organizations asked us about it on June 6,” 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.”
Apple said that the government has given it permission to share that data, and added that “regardless of the circumstances, our legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it.”
It added, “We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve.”
The company also detailed the safeguards it has in place regarding conversations that take place over iMessage and FaceTime. These are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them – and Apple itself cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, it does not store data related to customers’ location, map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.
“Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place,” the company said. “There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.”
News of Operation PRISM broke last week, when it was revealed that the National Security Agency and the FBI are working with the US and UK governments to allow them to make use of a direct link into the central servers of nine web companies to extract audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs. The idea is to allow intelligence analysts to track down foreign threats by monitoring the “chatter” that these represent. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple, with Dropbox being added “soon,” were all implicated as part of the program. Most of them have issued denials that they have allowed direct server access to the government.