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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I understand what's going on here. How does removing an app from the app store help them track down a stolen phone?

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My understanding is that there's two things they did: take down apps, and grant access to devices (presumably access to personal data). I'm specifically talking about the latter. Context:

> Apple said it received 29,183 demands from governments — down almost 10 percent on the last reporting period — to access 213,737 devices in the second half of last year.

Presumably investigation of stolen devices has the owner's consent, should it be really counted as information demanded by the government? Or can the police demand information about my phone that I myself wouldn't have access to?

To make it easy, the owner should only have to go to the police, with them taking care of everything else. I wouldn't want some old lady coordinate the data exchange between Apple and police. But this makes it hard for Apple to verify the owners consent. Thus I'm fine with them only knowing "... primarily due to ...".

On a second thought, how much detail should Apple get in the first place. If police suspects me of some wrongdoing, I probably wouldn't want any third party like Apple to get details about the cases as well.

Apple can grant access to its devices? I thought they can only grant access to a subset of things saved on iCloud, what is stored on devices should be off-limits.

Apple's report covers all government requests regardless of the reason for the request. Only 80 of the nearly 30,000 requests were related to app takedowns.

How does removing an app from the app store help them track down a stolen phone?

It doesn't. The Apple report is broad, and lists all government requests.

The headline writer chose to focus on App Store takedowns only.

There are lots of stats in the report, not just app takedowns. The German govt. requested a lot of device information, about as much as the US.

For number of affected devices - yes, but for actual requests - they are 3x higher than the USA

United States of America 4,680 requests Germany 12,343 requests

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