Apple has once again taken top marks in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Who Has Your Back? report, which assesses online service providers’ practices regarding privacy and transparency where government requests for access to user information are concerned. Last year, Apple earned six stars, the maximum score at the time indicating that the company adopted all of what the EFF considered to be best practices in this area.
In the report, the EFF states that it “commend[s] Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.” This year’s report evaluates companies based on five new criteria: whether the company follows industry-standard best practices, informs users about government data requests, discloses its policies on data retention, discloses content removal requests from government agencies, and has a public policy opposing backdoors for government agencies. Apple earned full marks across all categories, sharing the top spot with other companies such as Adobe, Dropbox, and Yahoo.
In contrast, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter came in at four stars, while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each only received three. The lowest grade this year went to AT&T, which received only one star.
