Here’s What Apple Knows About You (Spoiler: a Little)
Apple likes to say it cares more about your privacy than other tech giants like Facebook , Google, and Amazon , but is that really true? It turns out that the answer is unequivocal: yes.
How to know what Apple knows about you
Like Google and Facebook, Apple now offers a tool to help you download a file with all the data you have. But unlike other companies, Apple makes it much more difficult to access this information.
If you are determined to get your hands on this data, the first thing you need to do is go to Apple’s privacy policy page . Scroll down to the Privacy Issues section and click on the Privacy Contact Form link. You will be prompted to select your region and then select an issue from the drop-down menu. Click on “Privacy Issues” and then fill out the form by writing something like “I am requesting a copy of my personal information.”
Apple will eventually contact you and ask for a bunch of information to verify your identity (like your home address, phone number, and serial number on your iPhone). Once approved, you will receive the file. According to USA Today , the entire process takes about eight days – compared to several hours for Google and just minutes for Facebook.
What’s in the file?
Short answer: not very much. USA Today reports that it was all just 9 megabytes (compared to a 243MB file from Google and 881MB of a data dump from Facebook). Apple claims this is because it stores most of your personal data on your secure device.
However, Apple has some information, including recordings of every app and song you have ever downloaded, devices you have purchased, and any repairs done through Apple. He also knows your home address and your email address, but that’s about it.
Don’t expect to record your Safari browsing history or a log of all phone calls and text messages you’ve ever made on an iPhone. There is also no transcript of your conversations with Siri – Apple is collecting some of this data to improve its AI assistant, but your identity is not included in this information, so there is no way to trace it back to you.