Apple: Feds Made 5K Data Requests Since December

After revelations from Facebook and Microsoft, Apple is offering the public some details on government information requests. The US made between 4,000 and 5,000 requests to Apple for user data from December through May, the firm says; the requests were tied to between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts. Requests most frequently related to fighting crime, searches for missing kids, efforts to find Alzheimer's patients, and suicide prevention, the company said in a statement, per Reuters. "Our legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities."

"We don't collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place," the statement added. What's more, it said, FaceTime and iMessage conversations "are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them," not even Apple; nor are Siri requests stored "in any identifiable form," the company said, via the Guardian. Meanwhile, it must be bad because China is calling on the US to explain itself, Reuters reports: "We believe the United States should pay attention to the international community's concerns and demands and give the international community the necessary explanation," says a Chinese official. (More Apple stories.)