Apple has joined rivals including Facebook, Google and Twitter in calling on the US government to allow it to publish more details of the secret court orders its receives to disclose customers' information.
The company gave more details of its dealings with US authorities Monday as it sought to reassure customers in the wake of the scandal surrounding the National Security Agency's Prism surveillance program.
In a blogpost, Apple said it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from federal, state and local authorities for customer data between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013. The requests affected between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. Apple stressed that each request was evaluated on its merits and was not automatically granted.
The company is barred from revealing how many of the requests have been made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), the legal basis for the Prism surveillance program. The company said the figures dealt specifically with "requests we receive related to national security".
"Like several other companies, we have asked the US government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency," said Apple.
Last week Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter all called on the government to allow them to publish more details about the nature and number of requests for information they receive.
Google publishes a transparency report documenting numbers of government requests for information. However, like its rivals, Google is barred from detailing the number of Fisa requests its receives.
Source: The Guardian
