Apple drew attention to its privacy-friendly practices when it refused to comply with a warrant demanding that it access data on a customer’s cell phone. In 2015, Apple received a court order to provide data from an iPhone based on the two-hundred-year-old “All Writs Act.” Rather than complying, Apple challenged the order in court. Apple’s action earned it—and its new encrypted-by-default iPhones—widespread media attention.

Apple revised its law enforcement guidelines to require a search warrant before handing over information about its customers’ push notifications to law enforcement. This change followed a letter from Senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice expressing concern that law enforcement were asking Google and Apple to provide information about their customer’s app notifications—which could include sensitive information about health, finances, and personal messages—and then prohibiting the companies from publicly mentioning these requests. Following this revelation, competitor Google stated that it had always required judicial approval to hand over this kind of information. Apple soon followed course, leading Senator Wyden and others to cheer Apple for “doing the right thing” to increase privacy protections for its user’s information. 

Tech companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft won acclaim when they revised their policies to consistently notify users about government demands for their data. The changes were described as proudly “defiant” after the revelations of NSA, drawing praise from media and privacy advocates alike.

Google announced that it would change the way it stored users’ location history generated by Google Maps, placing the information on the device rather than central servers and shortening the retention period, making it so that the company could no longer respond to “geofence warrants” from law enforcement. Geofence warrants are a form of digital surveillance where law enforcement compels technology companies—like Google—to produce information about devices that were active in a particular geographic region. These dragnet surveillance warrants raise serious Fourth Amendment concerns and risk sweeping up sensitive information from innocent people. Facing a torrent of law enforcement demands, litigation challenges, and criticism from civil rights organizations, Google changed its default policies in a decision that led to cheers from privacy advocates and defense attorneys. 

Numerous companies, including Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, and Reddit have been applauded for issuing regular transparency reports in the wake of the disclosure of information about NSA spying by Edward Snowden. These reports detail how often the company received and responded to government requests for its users’ data. Press described the trend toward issuing such reports as so overwhelming as to become “commonplace for Internet companies,” while privacy advocates called the information “invaluable.”

Technology companies including Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and Google were praised for supporting the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The law, which was successfully enacted and went into effect in January 2016, requires California law enforcement to get a warrant to gain access to electronic information, including email and text messages, online documents, sensitive metadata, and location information. Press warmly applauded the companies for “taking note of customers’ privacy concerns” in uniting behind the effort.