According to the reports that we got from our sources a few days ago, Apple handed out one of the company’s bi-annual transparency reports, and it showed that besides the figures that are usually on takedown requests of various accounts, it delivered a statement which said that it will soon begin to report government requests to take down apps from the Apple App Store. The company mentioned that they would treat these requests as supposed violations of legal and policy provisions.
The purpose for revealing these figures is to inform the public of the amount of apps that the government attempt to block as well as how often they block the access to these apps, and last but not least, the particular orders that are obeyed by the company. Google on its own part does not report these numbers for its Google Play Store, so it is a bit of a concern that Apple would decide to make these reports unless of course they were fed up with the way the government handled them. We sent out word to Apple to find out the requests that were filed and which apps the requests bore upon, but Apple is yet to give us any information regarding that.
With reference to takedown requests that were made in the previous year, governments all over the world filed in requests for data on a total of 29,718 devices. 79 percent of information was provided in cases. Taking into consideration that Apple made verifications on each and every request from a legal standing and decided that a huge majority of these requests were made within legal rights jurisdictions of law enforcement, the figures taken could be promising. Our sources also reported that governments also made a request of Apple to get info on 3,358 Apple accounts and the data that was provided was about 82 percent.
