Comment by AlanYx
1 day ago
Many people might not be aware of it, but Apple publishes a breakdown of the number of government requests for data that it receives, broken down by country.
The number of UK requests has ballooned in recent years: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/gb.html#:~:text=77%...
Much of this is likely related to the implementation and automation of the US-UK data access agreement pursuant to the CLOUD Act, which has streamlined this type of request by UK law enforcement and national security agencies.
Looking at the ones for Germany, those seem like rookie numbers
https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/de.html#:~:text=77%...
It's also comparatively worse than the raw numbers suggest because the customer base of Apple phones in Germany is much smaller than in the UK.
I see numbers for USA and China very low as well.
Maybe they don't have/need to request? ;-) Just saying.
The problem is AFAIK this act is a lot different and Apple or any party that gets this order is completely forbidden to talk about it. So these kind of requests would not show up in this transparency requests. It is IMHO fair to assume Apple will UK this backdoor given they chose to disable Advanced Data Encryption and public would have no insight to amount and reasons to the backdoor usage. It is really troubling.
Sad to see the home of the magna carta slowly spiraling down into fascism and 1984. The government should be required to have a specific warrant to get at your personal data.
I don't share your findings, EVERY six-month period between January 2014 - June 2017 shows bigger requests than any six-month period in the last 5 years.