Apple will soon begin reporting ‘Government App Takedown’ requests

Apple has recently released its Transparency report for the second half of 2017. Just like every other year, it features the requests for customer and device data that is received from the government agencies the period of 1st July- 21st December. However, Apple has also said that the company will also begin reporting the app takedown requests.

Following the recent changes, a user will now be able to know the number of times government agency has tried to take down an app in order to block its access in the country. However, apart from mentioning the number of requests received Apple will also reveal the total number of requests that they have approved to take down an app from the App Store. Apple has further commented on the situation that:

"Starting with the Transparency Report period July 1 - December 31, 2018, Apple will report on Government requests to take down Apps from the App Store in instances related to alleged violations of legal and/or policy provisions".

It is being reported that Apple has received a government request for access to 29,718 devices and around 80 percent of the requests were fulfilled. However, the requests had dropped in comparison to the first half of the previous year while the number of devices that required government access has grown to 309,362. The Indian government has also requested access to 27 devices however only around half of those requests was approved by Apple.

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Further, Apple had also received 3,358 requests for data access of around 10,786 accounts, This also included the content from iCloud, stored images, email, contacts along with device backups. Apple, on the other hand, has provided the legal agencies and the law enforcement agencies access to about 82 percent of the cases. This was further topped off with around 16,000 of national security orders.

Also, in one of our recent articles related to Apple, we covered that, Apple is making a slight change to its iCloud storage plans with the aim to get hold of new users. The change that has been made to the iCloud storage is minor however a significant change for the iCloud platform is, read the complete story here.