How to Download a Copy of All the Data Apple Has on You

Apple is the largest technology company in the world and holds vast amounts of data on many users. Unlike Facebook and Google, which use your data to serve you ads, Apple is committed to protecting user data from prying eyes, including its own. However, the company still stores a lot of data, such as your billing address, FaceTime call metadata, and more. To find out what data Apple has about you, just follow the steps below.

How to get a copy of all the data Apple has on you

1. Go to Apple’s privacy page.
2. Sign in with your Apple ID.
3. If you are located in the European Union, this page will allow you to download all data from Apple. However, for those outside the EU, please visit this page.
4. Fill out all the details on the page in step 3, then add a subject and fill out the contact form with the information you need to see all the data Apple stores on its servers.
5. Approximately 24 hours after completing this action, you will receive an email from an Apple representative asking for your full name, address, Apple ID email, street address, and other details. Just reply to the email and provide all the details.
6. Now the waiting game begins. About a week to 10 days later, you will receive another email from Apple containing all the data the company has stored about you. The file is located in a password-protected zip file attached to the email. Apple sent us another email containing the password for the zip file.
7. After opening it, we saw several spreadsheets containing the data Apple had about us.

We were sent 17 spreadsheets containing data Apple held about us. This includes innocuous stuff, like a list of all the apps we’ve downloaded, and some unexpected stuff, like the email addresses of people we’re calling via FaceTime. Here is a quick list to help you understand the types of data we receive from Apple.

• Our phone number, email address, street address, and the date and time the Apple ID was created.
• Logs of all times we contacted Apple for customer support, including timestamps.
• A list of all the apps we downloaded from the App Store and Mac App Store on Apple devices.
• We access iCloud logs (including timestamps) of services such as contacts, bookmarks, photo library, browsing history, and the IP addresses accessing the service. For Safari browsing history, these logs also include the name of the device type and the operating system that accessed it.
• The serial number of the Apple product we use, and the serial number when the warranty expires.
• Every time we log into iTunes.
• All the time we played games through Game Center, including the IP address and timestamp of each time we started a game session.
• iMessage and FaceTime timestamp logs contain numbers or email addresses of people we are trying to contact. Note that these logs only include times when you attempted to initiate an iMessage or FaceTime call (for example, if you typed a contact’s name in the iMessage To box). There’s no actual message data or call logs because both services are end-to-end encrypted and Apple doesn’t even know if the call or message got through.
• Data used by Apple to contact you for marketing purposes.
• Every song you upload or download through iTunes Match or iTunes.

Apple will allow you to download all this data without sending an email at some point in the future, but until then, this method is as good as it gets. While this data may seem like a lot, it’s actually not that much, and much of what we’ve seen confirms that Apple isn’t really interested in tracking us. Much of the data it has, such as purchase history, can help you keep track of apps, devices, or music you purchased. We wish Apple would stop logging who we connect to via iMessage or FaceTime and when, but that wouldn’t be so bad since the content of calls and messages is never recorded.

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