Apple follows Google, Facebook in revealing US requests for user data

Apple has followed  Facebook, Google and Twitter in calling on the US government to allow it to publish more details of the secret court orders its received to disclose customers' information.

The company offered more details of its dealings with US authorities yesterday in a bid to reassure customers in the wake of the scandal surrounding the National Security Agency's Prism surveillance program.

Apple revealed in a blog post that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from federal, state and local authorities for customer data between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013. The requests affected between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices, however, the iPhone maker stressed that each request was assessed on its merits and was not granted automatically.

The company was barred from revealing the number of requests it had been made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), the legal basis for the Prism surveillance programme. According to the company, the figures dealt specifically with "requests we receive related to national security".

"Like several other companies, we have asked the US government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency," said Apple.

Apple's revelation comes after Microsoft and Facebook published similar numbers last week.

However, according to Google and Twitter such disclosures were not helpful.  "We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests," said a statement by Google published on Saturday.

"Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users."

Twitter's legal director, Benjamin Lee, said in a tweet: "We agree... it's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests - including Fisa [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] disclosures - separately.

Tech firms have been under pressure to disclose information about data passed to the National Security Agency after The Guardian and Washington Post revealed the existence of Prism - a programme that gave the NSA access to user data tech firms including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, and Apple held on their servers.

The existence of the surveillance scheme as also a separate phone records programme which it said had helped it thwart terrorist plots in the US and more than 20 other countries, was later confirmed by the NSA.