Apple has today posted a lengthy public statement on how they handle customer data following allegations of involvement in the NSA-operated PRISM surveillance program. In the letter, Apple reiterates that they don’t provide any government agency with direct access to their servers, and that only the “narrowest possible set of information” is provided to the authorities after a court order and an evaluation of Apple’s Legal team.

Apple writes:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Apple also explains that they don’t mantain a “mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place”.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Apple’s letter is available here, and it’s linked directly on Apple.com’s front page as well.