During the last evening, one of the vice-presidents of the company Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), confirmed the fact that monthly the data of thousands of customers are shared with government institutions all over the world. We are talking here about the requests made by these government institutions to the Apple company and about the data sent by the Americans based on perfectly legal requests.
Those at Apple have a dedicated team to constantly respond to this type of requests, having people active 24 hours a day to handle all requests. After receiving the requests, this dedicated team of the Apple company analyzes what is requested and whether they can be legally offered to the entity requesting the respective information.
Apple claims for months that it tries to protect user data and encrypts a good part of those that reach its servers. Despite this, when it receives requests to provide data about certain users, it provides the meta data it has access to, but few can provide clues about a user's identity.
Apple provides the data of thousands of customers to various governments every month
With the help of those from Apple, the founder of torrentz.eu was arrested, he was making a purchase through iTunes at a given moment, and the IP used was also identified in logs made on Facebook. This type of data is easily accessible to the Apple company, and when it is asked to provide it, it is obliged to do so, without being able to oppose it, not even in court.
"Thousands of times a month, we provide various government entities with information on Apple customers and the devices used, all in response to legal requests received from them. We have a team that responds to these requests 24 hours a day. Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple's ability to provide government institutions with metadata or other types of information deemed useful."
Nothing of what the Apple company says now is new, these details are already known by all those who deal with IT security. The reality is that any kind of company on the planet that has access to such data shares it, and that's because they are obliged by the authorities.
