The Indian Government has asked Apple to provide information about 27 devices and 18 accounts in the January-June period. The firm provided details about most of the cases owing to an iTunes Gift Card fraud investigation.
The total number of requests from India were asked in different formats like subpoenas, court orders, warrants or other valid reports including 34 financial identifiers and three emergency reports, Apple stated in Transparency report which it released on Monday.
Talking about device requests and financial identifiers, Apple provided data to Indian Government in 63% and 85% of the cases respectively. “The high number of financial identifiers were specified in requests predominantly due to an iTunes Gift Card fraud investigation. One request may contain one or multiple identifiers. We count the number of identifiers identified in each request and report the total number of identifiers by type (Device, Financial Identifier, Account)”, the Cupertino giant said.
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Speaking about account requests, Apple granted data in 78% of cases and for 3 emergency requests. Earlier in July-December 2017 period, Apple granted data in 14 out of 27 requests made by Indian govt. Similar to various popular tech sites which release transparency report bi-annually, Apple has launched a new transparency report website which is a lot easier to understand than its earlier website.
Apple has received 32,342 requests worldwide from the various government to access 1,68,823 devices and the tech giant has provided 80% of the requests. In general, the Cupertino giant has granted more than 25,000 government requests to access user’s data in the first six months of 2018. Hence, there is an increase of 9% requests as compared to July-Dec 2017 period.
“Apple is committed to your privacy and being transparent about government requests for customer data globally. This report provides information on government requests received,” said the company.
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