Recently, Apple quietly made available on its privacy website a place for you to download information that Apple has on file for you.
This is a list of a dozen or so files that you may download individually and extract.
I have disabled iCloud and other “sharing” features on Apple products so most of these are empty files. But I have inspected the resining files and am sharing items that I didn’t expect to find.
#1 Safari bookmarks
I do not have bookmark sharing enabled for Safari. So it was surprising that bookmarks are being synced. Maybe I did enable it in the past for testing but then disabled it. I would have expected that this information would be deleted from my account.
#2 Chat transcripts for other people
I had purchased an iPhone and gave it to somebody else. I never activated that phone on my account. However, when that recipient person later contacted Apple Support to fix an unexpected charge on their account, the details of this chat transcript are available to me.
This is unexpected because that person does not know my Apple ID (the email address I gave to Apple). The only way Apple is associating that device with me is because I originally purchased it.
#3 Phone calls with other people
In this case I ordered an iPad and shipped it to somebody else’s house. That person called Apple because it was not received. They identified the package by the FedEx tracking number. That person is not me, but the customer support transcript, including this person’s phone number (from caller ID) was available to me in my Apple data download.
▧
Comments
There are no comments yet.
Please discuss this topic anywhere and let me know any great comments or media coverage I should link here.