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Apple complied with 80 percent of US law enforcement requests in second half of 2015

The company receives thousands of requests from law enforcement, both in the US and around the world, Apple's transparency report shows.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
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Apple's spat with the FBI is not representative of how many national security requests it complies with.

James Martin/CNET

US law enforcement asked Apple for information 4,000 times, covering 16,112 devices, in the second half of 2015. Apple complied with 80 percent of the requests, according to the company's transparency report, released Monday.

The number of requests Apple received between July and December 2015 increased from the first half of the year, but decreased from the same period in 2014.

The publication of the report follows a recent spat between Apple and the FBI in which the company refused to bypass the security on the iPhone of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook. The figures released this week show that despite refusing the FBI on this occasion, Apple frequently provides help to law enforcement.

Apple received between 1,250 and 1,499 specific national security orders at the end of 2015 and, without giving specific numbers, said that these orders ending up affecting between 1,000 and 1,249 user accounts.

Fewer demands for information regarding devices were honored in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, which combined made 19,322 requests. Apple only gave out information in 52 percent of cases. Germany made by far the most requests, totalling 11,989.