March 28, 2024

Bits Blog: Apple Releases Some Data on Government Requests

A sign outside of Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The company said Sunday that it does not store data related to customers’ location, map searches or search requests “in any identifiable form,” meaning it likely stores the data without linking it to a named individual.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press A sign outside of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The company said Sunday that it does not store data related to customers’ location, map searches or search requests “in any identifiable form,” meaning it likely stores the data without linking it to a named individual.

Amid reports that technology companies cooperated with the United States government’s surveillance efforts, Apple has maintained that it does not provide the government with unfettered access to its servers. On Monday, the company released some numbers and information about its online services to try to prove it.

In a statement on its Web site, Apple said that from December 2012 through May 2013, it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from American law enforcement agencies for customer data. Among those requests, government officials asked for information about roughly 10,000 accounts or devices, Apple said.

Apple said the requests came from federal, state and local authorities regarding both national security matters and criminal investigations. It said the most common types of request came from police investigations of robberies and other crimes, searches for missing children, attempts to prevent a suicide or searches for people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Apple also published details about its online communication services, iMessage and FaceTime. It said it chooses not to store the content of exchanges between customers on these services, and therefore it does not hand over this type of data to law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, it said, those conversations are encrypted, so nobody but the sender and the receiver can see them.

“Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place,” the company said in the statement.

Apple said it also does not store data related to customers’ location, map searches or search requests “in any identifiable form,” meaning it likely stores the data without linking it to a named individual.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/apple-releases-some-data-on-government-requests/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Bits Blog: GoDaddy Says Its Troubles Were Not Hacker-Related

GoDaddy, the Web services company, said on Tuesday that its extensive technical problems on Monday were a result of internal issues, not an attack by a supporter of Anonymous, the loose confederation of rogue hackers.

In a statement, Scott Wagner, the company’s interim chief executive, said the “intermittent service outages” were caused by an internal network error. An Anonymous supporter had taken credit for the problems on Twitter.

“The service outage was not caused by external influences,” Mr. Wagner said. “It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com.”

“At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised,” he said.

GoDaddy’s Web site was down for several hours on Monday afternoon, as were several million Web sites that use GoDaddy for domain hosting and other services. The company was previously the target of two notable denial of service attacks, one in 2007 and another in 2009.

Last week an Anonymous-related group claimed it had obtained a million identification numbers for Apple mobile devices by hacking into the computer of an F.B.I. agent. As it turned out, the data was actually stolen from a company in Florida.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/godaddy-denies-anonymous-attack/?partner=rss&emc=rss