“Apple earns five stars in this year’s Who Has Your Back report,” The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes. “This is Apple’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report. We commend Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes:
Industry-Accepted Best Practices. Apple requires a warrant before giving content to law enforcement, stating in its law enforcement guidelines:
Law enforcement is required to obtain a search warrant that is issued upon a probable cause showing for search warrants requesting user content.
In addition to a law enforcement guide, Apple publishes a transparency report.
Inform users about government data demands. Apple promises to provide advance notice to users about government data demands and will delay notice only in limited circumstances:
Apple will notify its customers when their personal information is being sought in response to legal process except where providing notice is prohibited by the legal process itself, by a court order Apple receives (e.g., an order under 18 U.S.C. §2705(b)), or by applicable law or where Apple, in its sole discretion, believes that providing notice could create a risk of injury or death to an identifiable individual or group of individuals, in situations where the case relates to child endangerment, or where notice is not applicable to the underlying facts of the case.
Disclose data retention policies. Apple publishes information about its data retention policies, including retention of IP addresses and deleted content. It includes a range of details in its legal process guidelines, for example:
Connection logs are retained up to 30 days.
Disclose content removal requests. Apple discloses the number of times governments seek the removal of user content or accounts and how often the company complies, including formal legal process as well as informal government requests.
Pro-user public policy: oppose backdoors. In a public, official written format, Apple opposes the compelled inclusion of deliberate security weaknesses. In its statement on government information requests, Apple states:
In addition, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a “back door” in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed any government access to our servers. And we never will.
Tons more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Who has your back? Apple, that’s who.
SEE ALSO:
Edward Snowden supports Apple’s stance on customer privacy – June 17, 2015
Edward Snowden: Apple is a privacy pioneer – June 5, 2015
Edward Snowden’s privacy tips: ‘Get rid of Dropbox,” avoid Facebook and Google – October 13, 2014
AT&T and Verizon are the worst. Who’da thunk it?
In fact WhatsApp is the worst with only one star but at least they oppose back doors unlike Verizon/AT&T.
Oh, my bad. Didn’t notice AT&T only had one star.
While AT&T follows industry standards, it has NO practices which favor the users. Just what you’d expect. We’re just revenue streams to them, not real people.
the only thing I like about ATT is the cute girl in the commercials but even she is starting to annoy me
That award doesn’t mean much if Adobe got 5 stars.
Doesn’t mean much if Dropbox got 5. Condosleeza Rice is a Director or Board Member of drop box. No way she doesn’t have some influence over their snooping practices.
Apple, Adobe, Dropbox, Yahoo, and the other so-called 5-star companies are simply encouraging terrorism. Don’t they care about the children! It is because of these companies that we risk seeing a mushroom cloud over the US in the near future.
There, have I hit all the government talking points?