Tech giant Apple has just released its first regular transparency reports for the first time. The reports includes details on which and how often countries filed for data requests.
Data requests itself has many purposes. Mostly, it is to help the government tracking for stolen devices. But it can also for other things such as acessing user’s iCloud backup files. As well as acessing their emails or deleting an account entirely.
Those things were not really new. The new highlight is that Apple chose to reveal that governments have been requesting for apps take downs. Taking down apps means removing the app from its App Store. This is due to governments’ suspicion of the app for violating local laws.
In total, there are 80 takedown requests from many governments by the second half of 2018. The takedown requests covered a total of 770 apps in total. After various researches, Apple decided to remove only 634 of it.
Apple removes the most in Chinese App Store
China has the biggest portion of the request. The country filed 56 takedown requests that cover up to 626 individual apps. Mainly, the country filed for violation against pornography and illegal gambling laws. But Apple only removed 517 app from the Chinese App Store.
The company deemed that the rest 89 apps did not actually violates any local law in China.
At the second place Russia filed 10 takedown requests for 11 apps. Then Vietnam with 3 takedown requests for 11 apps. Turkey also filed the same number as Vietnam, but only targeting 3 individual apps.
The rest are Netherlands, Austria, Kuwait, Lebanon, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland. Each filed only one takedown requests. It covers 8, 5, 6, 1, 37, 25, and 19 apps respectively.
Russia and Norway both requested the takedown due to illegal gambling laws. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia requested the takedown according to violation of privacy law.
The tech giant company also reported a 16% increase of requests for account data. Including for information stored in iCloud. The 4,875 requests affect 22,503 accounts.
