Transparency Report: Government requests for customer data globally | Hacker News Reader

Transparency Report: Government requests for customer data globally

apple.com

123 pointszachguo32 comments

To compare the stats across countries, it's helpful to factor in mobile OS market share and population size. http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Also, transparency report for USA: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

Belarus, Costa Rica, small as they are, contrast significantly with Germany and Singapore.

The market share of Android vs iOS in Singapore is interesting, I guess because iPhone Xs (max).

What the hell happened in Singapore?

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/singapore

It went from 87% to Android in July 2018 to being neck and neck with iOS.

Don't believe everyone tosssed their Androids for an iPhone.

Why would you not believe that? Changing phones isn’t a big deal when upgrading.

Guess the iPhone X’s full screen design was a hit - seen quite a few people on the train here with them; I’m quite surprised given the pricing of the iPhone X line, guess there are more more with cash to spare than I thought.

Maybe even some people bought the iPhone X for the gaming performance.

In not putting in cause the quality of the iPhone.

But the iPhone X didn't came in mid-2018 to cause such a crackdown.

Such a hit that would cause a 30(!)% marketshare change?

I think the metric depend on the network of sites that provide the metric. So a lake of suffisent input from popular website of a country could bias result for such a country. And a shift in the network could result on a shift on the data. The question that remain is was is more accurate before or does this shift result of a better accuracy.

Why was this parent comment downvoted? It provided useful resources.

It's mildly surprising to see countries of the "free world" ask Apple for user data much more often than some authoritarian governments or dictatorships - compare UK, US, AU, DE, FR, ES with HU, RU, CN, TR.

Authoritarian goverments & dictatorships don't need to ask a phone maker for data, they have already existing structures of surveilance (not to mention their targets don't get to say no to using that fingerprint code).

Yeah sure, and US, UK, Germany, Australia and others do not have surveillance at all.

Yes, but it doesn't state anywhere on the origins of the targets of the requests, only the gov't that made the request. It could contain requests for data on foreign citizens traveling to/in the country.

Yeah but we dont simply disappear as a result of what they receive.

On the contrary.

Compare Poland and Germany for example. (Poland - 32 device requests and 14 thousand identifiers vs Germany 13 704 device requests and 26 thousand identifiers). It show that when Poland targets people in bulk while Germany targets specific individuals (each probably requires separate judical order).

Poland famously in 2H2014 made request for data of half a million iPhone users (80% requests for data worldwide). FYI Poland is not at war, under terrorist threat and it is relatively peaceful country but the government like to keep their hands in citizens pockets and it's special branches are out of control.

Dang, Germany! What happened there? That is a huge outlier.

They seem to acknowledge it and explain:

> High volume of device requests predominantly due to stolen devices investigations.

> High number of financial identifier requests predominantly due to iTunes Gift Card and credit card fraud investigations.

Does this mean the Polizei actively work on recovering stolen devices and money for public cases?

That’s more of an impactful effort than the “We’ll see if it turns up” guarantee of American police, which basically means S.O.L.

It looks like they've consistently been on the high end judging by their past few years: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/de.html

It is quite hard to put this in context without the general Apple usage and crime rate in these countries.

Australia has quite an enormous number per population.

Germany has far worse ratios.

For others trying to figure out how to see countries besides Andorra on a phone: swipe horizontally on the country "card."

I'm kinda surprised how many NSA requests were sent through in the US... compared to China. Why? WTF?

Why would Chinese government ask Apple for help when they can directly get user data from ISP and Tencent? Chinese local police can read people chat messages in real time.

Can they read iMessages?

Even Apple can't read iMessage. I guess in this case they will simply force you to unlock your iPhone to let them read everything in it.

IIRC, they can't read message data but message metadata, sometimes that's enough for authorities.

I don’t see any where stating the organization that made the request. How do you know it’s NSA? I’d imagine it’s more likely the FBI.

Apple already gave China access to all Chinese iCloud data. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-...

Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, ... seems like most of the Western Balkan hasn't requested anything

"requests"

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