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Bits Blog: Apple Releases Some Data on Government Requests

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: Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says

Uli Seit for The New York Times

3:21 p.m. | Updated

Adding text-messaging statistics among corporate customers.

In countries around the world, text-message traffic has been shrinking because Internet-powered alternatives are becoming so widely used. American carriers have fought off the decline — until now.

For the first time, the American wireless market saw a decline in the total number of messages sent by each customer each month, according to a report published Monday by Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst who is a consultant for wireless carriers. In the third quarter of this year, cellphone owners sent an average of 678 texts a month, down from 696 texts a month in the previous quarter.

Though that’s a small dip, the change is noteworthy because for several years, text messaging had been steadily growing in the United States. Mr. Sharma said it was too early to tell whether the decline here would continue, but he noted that Internet-based messaging services, like Facebook messaging and Apple’s iMessage, had been chomping away at SMS usage. He said the decline would become more pronounced as more people buy smartphones. A bit more than 50 percent of cellphone owners here have smartphones.

The downward trend in text messaging is also evident among American businesses who offer cellphones to their employees. Tero Kuittinen, vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps people manage cellphone costs, said that employees at 10 of its corporate clients were sending 5 to 10 percent fewer text messages than a year ago.

Nonetheless, the seemingly imminent decline of text messaging, which is highly lucrative for carriers, doesn’t mean they need to lose much sleep. Big carriers like ATT and Verizon Wireless are still posting healthy profits, largely because of revenue from mobile data plans, the fees people pay to use the Internet over their networks. Among the top three carriers, mobile data accounts for about 45 percent of the average amount of money made from each customer, Mr. Sharma said.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/text-messaging-declines-united-states/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Bits Blog: Apple Releases Some Data on Government Requests

Bits Blog: Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says

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