Your privacy is important to Apple so we’ve developed a Privacy Policy that covers how we collect, use, disclose, transfer, and store your personal information.
In addition to this Privacy Policy, we provide data and privacy information imbedded in our products connected with our Data & Privacy Icon for certain features that ask to use your personal information.
Personal information is data that can be used to identify or contact a single person.
You may be asked to provide your personal information anytime you are in contact with Apple or an Apple affiliated company. Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising. You are not required to provide the personal information that we have requested, but, if you chose not to do so, in many cases we will not be able to provide you with our products or services or respond to any queries you may have.
Here are some examples of the types of personal information Apple may collect and how we may use it:
When you create an Apple ID, apply for commercial credit, purchase a product, download a software update, register for a class at an Apple Retail Store, connect to our services, contact us including by social media or participate in an online survey, we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, device identifiers, IP address, location information, credit card information and profile information where the contact is via social media.
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. Apple will use such information to fulfill your requests, provide the relevant product or service, or for anti-fraud purposes.
In certain jurisdictions, we may ask for a government issued ID in limited circumstances including when setting up a wireless account and activating your device, for the purpose of extending commercial credit, managing reservations, or as required by law.
We may process your personal information: for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, with your consent, for compliance with a legal obligation to which Apple is subject, for the performance of a contract to which you are party, in order to protect your vital interests, or when we have assessed it is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by Apple or a third party to whom it may be necessary to disclose information. If you have questions about this legal basis you can contact the Data Protection Officer.
The personal information we collect allows us to keep you posted on Apple’s latest product announcements, software updates, and upcoming events. If you don’t want to be on our mailing list, you can opt-out anytime by updating your preferences.
We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes. We may also use your personal information for account and network security purposes, including in order to protect our services for the benefit of all our users, and pre-screening or scanning uploaded content for potentially illegal content, including child sexual exploitation material. Where we use your information for anti-fraud purposes it arises from the conduct of an online transaction with us. We limit our uses of data for anti-fraud purposes to those which are strictly necessary and within our assessed legitimate interests to protect our customers and our services. For certain online transactions we may also validate the information provided by you with publicly accessible sources.
We may use your personal information, including date of birth, to verify identity, assist with identification of users, and to determine appropriate services. For example, we may use date of birth to determine the age of Apple ID account holders.
From time to time, we may use your personal information to send important notices, such as communications about purchases and changes to our terms, conditions, and policies. Because this information is important to your interaction with Apple, you may not opt out of receiving these communications.
We may have received your personal information from other persons if that person has shared their content with you using Apple products, sent gift certificates and products, or invited you to participate in Apple services or forums. We may also validate the information provided by you when creating an Apple ID with a third party for security and fraud prevention purposes.
If you are a potential candidate for employment with Apple, we may have received your personal information from third parties such as recruiters or external websites. We will use the personal information we receive to contact you about a potential opportunity or in evaluating your candidacy. If you did not provide us your personal information directly, we will inform you of the source when we first contact you regarding your candidacy. For research and development purposes, we may use datasets such as those that contain images, voices or other data that could be associated with an identifiable person. When acquiring such datasets, we do so in accordance with applicable law in the jurisdiction in which the dataset is hosted. When using such datasets for research and development, we do not attempt to re-identify individuals who may appear therein.
We also collect data in a form that does not, on its own, permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:
We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.
We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud services, our iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, App Store for Apple TV and iBooks Stores and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non‑personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.
We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address.
If we do combine non-personal information with personal information the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.
Apple’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches. We treat information collected by cookies and other technologies as non‑personal information. However, to the extent that Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or similar identifiers are considered personal information by local law, we also treat these identifiers as personal information. Similarly, to the extent that non-personal information is combined with personal information, we treat the combined information as personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.
Ads that are delivered by Apple’s advertising platform may appear in Apple News and in the App Store. If you do not wish to receive ads targeted to your interests from Apple's advertising platform, you can choose to enable Limit Ad Tracking, which will opt your Apple ID out of receiving such ads regardless of what device you are using. If you enable Limit Ad Tracking on your mobile device, third-party apps cannot use the Advertising Identifier, a non-personal device identifier, to serve you targeted ads. You may still see ads in the App Store or News based on context like your search query or the channel you are reading. In third-party apps, you may see ads based on other information.
Apple also uses cookies and other technologies to remember personal information when you use our website, online services, and applications. Our goal in these cases is to make your experience with Apple more convenient and personal. For example, knowing your first name lets us welcome you the next time you visit the Apple Online Store. Knowing your country and language − and if you are an educator, your school − helps us provide a customized and more useful shopping experience. Knowing someone using your computer or device has shopped for a certain product or used a particular service helps us make our advertising and email communications more relevant to your interests. And knowing your contact information, hardware identifiers, and information about your computer or device helps us personalize your operating system, set up your iCloud service, and provide you with better customer service.