Paul Morris·

How To Check What Personal Data Apple Stores About You

You were aware that Apple holds a file of information about each customer, right? Of course, you were. Well, like other companies, Apple holds user data too, and it also affords customers with a way to download a data file containing that information.

These days, the public has been going crazy over data, what type of data is held about them, and how companies use that data in the wake of the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Apple has always been one of those corporations which genuinely seems to respect the data that it holds about an individual, with CEO Tim Cook referencing on multiple occasions that the company could pull in a load of revenue if it chose to monetize its users, but refuses to make the customer its product. With that said, the company still holds information about people, and also provides a way to access that. But unlike most other companies though, Apple doesn’t sell data to others (read: advertisers) cause the company makes money by selling its products as well as services and rarely ever offer free, ad-driven services which companies like Facebook, Google and others do.

Now to check what information does Apple store about you, here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Head on over to Apple Customer Privacy Policy page here: apple.com/privacy/contact/

Step 2: You will see the “I have a question about” drop-down. Select Privacy issues.

Step 3: Fill out the form that you are provided with. Enter your name, email address, and location.

Step 4: Add an arbitrary sentence in that form requesting all of your data. So, for example, just stick in “Please send me all of the data that Apple has on me.”

Step 5: Send the request.

In approximately seven day’s time you will receive a spreadsheet file from Apple containing information such as your Apple ID and all purchases and downloads linked to that ID, as well as things like songs which have been matched using iTunes Match, among other things. Interestingly, the information doesn’t contain Siri requests and questions which have been asked to the digital assistant as the company anonymizes these requests and simply cannot attribute them to a single or specific user.

How Apple handles and provides data will also be changing later in the year when the company will allow a user to download an entire archive of their data in order to comply with new European data protection and privacy legislation. However, Siri, Maps, and News data will remain anonymous.

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