General Category > General Computing/Macintosh
Article on what user-data is kept by Apple.
elagache:
Dear Weatheraardvark, X-Air, Blick, and WeatherCat concerned about private data types,
--- Quote from: Blicj11 on May 07, 2018, 09:54:54 PM ---Methinks thou hast misread the sentence. From the article, "The one sentence highlight: a list of my downloads, purchases and repairs, but not my search histories through the Siri personal assistant or the Safari browser." (Boldface added by me.)
--- End quote ---
Phew! . . .
My apologies! :-[ Somehow I got that Siri searches weren't preserved but somehow I lost the connection to Safari. That certainly makes me feel better. There was no reason for Apple to collect anything more than coarse statistics on the users of Apple products. They only need to know how to make the experience of browsing and other software better.
--- Quote from: Blicj11 on May 07, 2018, 09:54:54 PM ---Thanks for posting the link; I have requested my data from Apple because I am curious.
--- End quote ---
Do let us know what you discover!
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
Blicj11:
I requested from Apple a copy of whatever data they are keeping on me. They replied within two days as follows:
--- Quote ---Thank you for contacting Apple's privacy team.
At Apple, we take the privacy and security of your personal information very seriously. We design our products and services with
this in mind.
We can arrange for a report of your account details as controlled by Apple.
However, to ensure security of your personal information, we need to confirm your identity. Could you please send me the following
information associated with the account, where available:
- full name
- Apple ID if known
- email address
- street address
- telephone number
- a registered product serial number
- AppleCare support case number, or date and time of AppleCare support chat
Please do not send any sensitive information such as credit card details or passwords.
--- End quote ---
I provided that information and a little less than a month later they sent me an encrypted zip file. It contained several excel spreadsheets (which I thought was funny - they did not send me Numbers spreadsheets) with various logs, containing such things as:
* iCloud logs
* Mail logs
* FaceTime logs
* iTunes Purchases
* AppleCare calls
* and a few other thingsThey have one file that has my contact information in it and all of the rest of the logs contained absolutely no personal information other than my name and Apple ID. Even the iTunes purchases log had some type of encryption so that the plain text name of whatever I was purchasing was not identified.
They said this, in the email containing the zip file:
--- Quote ---We are complying with your request in full and are not refusing access to any personal data held on a relevant filing system in relation to you. The attached password protected file provides the data to you that is not otherwise available to you in your account. We have also included a description of the fields in the document that may not otherwise be apparent. We have not included information contained within your account, if any, such as calendar contents, email contents, iTunes content etc. If you use iCloud you will note that we have extremely short retention periods for how long we store such data and we have provided all data that was available to us at the time at which we processed your request on our systems.
I would also like to highlight the attached from our recent message on Customer Privacy at http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy:
?For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers? location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.?
Our privacy policy at www.apple.com/privacy sets out the categories of personal data in our control, our purposes of processing and the circumstances in which personal data may be disclosed to third parties.
We are, of course, available to provide any further clarifications or answer any queries in relation to your data that you may have.
--- End quote ---
Overall, I am satisfied with Apple's commitment to privacy and am impressed with their willingness to share with me a copy of what their servers are tracking about my interactions with the company.
elagache:
Dear Blick and WeatherCat privacy watchers,
--- Quote from: Blicj11 on June 05, 2018, 06:39:49 PM ---I requested from Apple a copy of whatever data they are keeping on me.
. . . .
I provided that information and a little less than a month later they sent me an encrypted zip file. It contained several excel spreadsheets (which I thought was funny - they did not send me Numbers spreadsheets) with various logs, containing such things as:
* iCloud logs
* Mail logs
* FaceTime logs
* iTunes Purchases
* AppleCare calls
* and a few other things
. . . . .
Overall, I am satisfied with Apple's commitment to privacy and am impressed with their willingness to share with me a copy of what their servers are tracking about my interactions with the company.
--- End quote ---
Thanks for sharing! [tup] Sounds like indeed Apple is truly "walking the walk" when it comes to user privacy.
--- Quote from: Blicj11 on June 05, 2018, 06:39:49 PM ---It contained several excel spreadsheets (which I thought was funny - they did not send me Numbers spreadsheets) with various logs . . .
--- End quote ---
I guess that settles the matter for me of whether or not to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office! ;D
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
xairbusdriver:
Numbers can probably open that Excel spread sheet since that's likely how it was created. Apple simply want to make it easy for Windows users who are also using Apple products. You know they would freak out if given a .numbers file. They would probably suspect it was some kind of malware; Windows can only use .3 suffixes! lol(1) OK, it's almost that bad...
Heard an interview with Mr. Cook today, he claims Apple has never been nor wants to be a data collection company.
I am surprised that the report is available, I thought I'd read that it would months before it would be available in the US. I thought it was first available for the EU group.
--- Quote from: TidBITS, May 31 ---This feature is currently available to users in the European Union, as well as members of the European Single Market: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. Apple has said it will roll out this feature worldwide in the coming months.
--- End quote ---
Blicj11:
--- Quote from: elagache on June 05, 2018, 10:18:48 PM ---I guess that settles the matter for me of whether or not to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office! ;D
--- End quote ---
I made that jump a few months ago (to Office 365 from Office for Mac 2011) and am a satisfied customer. Except for the fact that it requires a subscription, which just means over the long haul, they will extract more cash from you than the old way. But the monthly updates to the products are nice, and tech support is good. Subscription models appear to be the way of the future for more and more companies. I did give Numbers and Pages a fair trial, but if you are doing anything more than simple documents, they don't cut it when you have to share documents and spreadsheets with others. And Apple hasn't really provided any meaningful upgrades to what used to be called the iWork collection for years now. I am still pretty satisfied with Keynote and the ability to use either my iPhone or Apple Watch as a remote device for controlling presentation slides, but for serious users, Pages and Numbers just don't have enough fire power.
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