Apple Provided Customer Data To Indian Government Owing To An Investigation

Apple has been requested by the government of India to provide it information for 18 accounts and 27 devices from January to June this year, and most of those pieces of information were used for investigating an iTunes Gift Card fraud.

There are also 3 emergency requests and 34 financial identifiers among the number of requests from the Indian government in different formats such as warrants, court orders, subpoenas and other legal requests as well, according to Apple’s Transparency report issued on Monday. When it comes to device requests, the tech giant provided to the government of India data in 63% of cases and also 85% in cases relating to financial identifiers.

Apple's Transparency report

In terms of account requests, the iPhone maker provided the government data in 78% of the cases and all three emergency requests as well. Apple has just launched a new website that makes it much easier for people to sort through the information that it publicly discloses about data requests from governments.

The US-based company had received a total of 32,342 requests globally from various governments to give them access to 1,63,923 devices, and Apple granted 80% of those requests. In the first half of this year, Apple approved over 25,000 requests from different governments to allow them to access to its customer data and that was nearly a 9% increase in the number of demand compared to the last two quarters of 2017.