Home > News

Apple to Let You Download All Your Data They Have Collected, Starting with Europe

By Laura Tucker
Apple to Let You Download All Your Data They Have Collected, Starting with Europe Featured Image

Apple is complying with the new General Data Protection Regulation ahead of the deadline, and they will now let you download all your data they have collected on you. This will be done with a new tool, starting with the European Union.

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is designed to give Internet users more control over what information is collected about them and how it’s collected. You can find out everything you need to know about GDPR.

Managing Your Data

All Apple users can manage their data. You simply need to visit privacy.apple.com. This site asks you to sign in with your Apple ID and password and will then take you to a page that describes how Apple protects your privacy on your Apple ID.

news-apple-download-data-id

Clicking “Continue” takes you to another page where it will allow you to “Manage Your Data.” It gives you choices of “Correct your data” and “Delete your account.” The latter is self-explanatory.

news-apple-download-data-manage

If you want to correct your data and download it as well, you can click “Get started” under “Correct your data.” This asks you to sign in once again, then takes you to a page that shows all your devices, your address, your birthday, your Apple subscriptions, etc.

There is also an option there to manage your data. Once I clicked this, it just sent me back to the beginning of this process. I am assuming this is because I am not in Europe, and this tool is so far only open to the EU.

Downloading Your Data

If you want to have a record of what Apple has on you, you can download it from this tool, if you’re in Europe, though Apple has promised that it will be worldwide eventually. This will include app usage, documents, photos, videos, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and mail.

It will not include app, book, movie, TV show, or music purchases nor your Apple Online Store transaction history and Marketing communications history, though there is a link to follow if you would like that information as well.

There’s a third option as well. You can choose to deactivate your data. It will become temporarily unavailable to you or Apple, or anyone else. But realize if you do this that iMessage, iTunes, and iCloud won’t work. You can reactivate your account at any time and get all your information back, but this may take up to seven days.

If you’re uncomfortable with anyone holding onto your information, you can also just permanently delete all of your data. It can again take up to seven days for your delete request to be approved. And you need to be careful, as once it’s deleted, there’s no way to get it back.

It’s In Your Control

All of this is in your control. All data, some data, no data. Apple will only be in control of what you want them to be in control of. Will you choose to download all your data on Apple? Or will you choose to delete it? Let us know below in the comments section.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.