iTunes Store & Privacy

Your searches, browsing, purchases and device trust score may be used to personalise your experience, send you notifications including for Apple marketing, improve the iTunes Store and other Apple online stores, and prevent fraud.
 

iTunes Store is designed to protect your information and let you choose what you share.

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  • We collect your personal data so we can provide you with the content you purchase, download or want to update in the iTunes Store and other Apple online stores, including the App Store and Apple Books.
  • We also use information about your account, purchases and downloads in the stores to offer advertising to ensure that ads on the App Store, Apple News and Stocks, where available, are relevant to you. You have choices with respect to this advertising, as described below.
  • We use information about your purchases, downloads and other activities in the stores to tailor features, offer personalised recommendations and send you notifications, including for Apple marketing. You can opt out of the use of this data for this purpose, as described below.
  • To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase. The submissions are designed so Apple cannot learn the real values on your device. The scores are stored for a fixed time on our servers.
  • To find ways to improve the stores, we use information about your browsing, purchases, searches and downloads. These records are stored with IP address, a random unique identifier (where that arises) and Apple ID when you are signed in to the App Store or other Apple online stores.

Providing the Stores

We use your personal data to provide the services and features in the iTunes Store and other Apple online stores. This information includes, for example, your account and payment information, which you can access and change in Settings, and your purchase history.

When you download content from the iTunes Store, identifiers such as your device’s hardware ID and IP address are logged by Apple along with your Apple ID.

Apple will automatically make the iTunes content you download available to you in the Library tab of the Apple Music, Apple TV or Apple Books apps, depending on the type of content you have downloaded.

Improving the Stores

To improve the experience in the iTunes Store and other Apple online stores, we collect information about your usage of the iTunes Store, including when you open or close the store, what content you search for, the content you view and download, and your interactions with notifications. We also collect information about your device, such as the type of device, the version of your operating system and the amount of free space on your device. We may use this information to assess whether requested content can be downloaded, to understand general trends in use of device storage and whether your device is connected by Wi-Fi or mobile data. For example, we may use this information in the following ways:

  • What you search for makes it possible for us to offer trending searches.
  • Knowing what content you viewed or download makes it possible for us to offer personalised features.
  • Knowing the free space on your device allowed us to build the feature that lets you buy movies on your iPhone without downloading them at purchase.

Personalising the Stores

We use your interactions with the iTunes Store to help you discover the content that’s most relevant to you. For example, we recommend content that we think will be of interest to you based on what you’ve previously searched for, viewed, downloaded, updated or reviewed in the iTunes Store. We also use your purchase history and payment methods together with account information derived from your Apple ID. You can disable personalisation features in the App Store, Apple Books, iTunes Store, Apple TV, Podcasts and for subscriptions from Apple by turning off Personalised Recommendations for your Apple ID. On your iOS or iPadOS device, go to Settings > [your name] > Media & Purchases, tap View Account, then tap to turn off Personalised Recommendations.

Communicating with You

Apple may use information about your account, such as the Apple products you own and your subscriptions to Apple services, to send you communications about the iTunes Store and other Apple products, services and offers that may be of interest to you. Apple may also use information about your activity within the iTunes Store to send you communications about new features, content and offers available on the iTunes Store, and Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Books may send you communications about your iTunes content that Apple makes available in those apps.

Email Marketing
You may receive these communications by email if you consent to receive email marketing. You can change your email preferences and opt out of receiving these emails by going to appleid.apple.com, or on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > [your name] > Name, Phone Numbers, Email.

Push Notifications
You may also receive these communications by push notification. To update your notification preferences or to opt out of notifications on your iOS or iPadOS device, go to Settings > Notifications > iTunes Store.

Advertising

Apple-delivered advertising helps people discover apps, products and services on the App Store, Apple News and Stocks. We use information about your device, account, purchases, subscriptions and downloads to ensure that ads are relevant. When you search on the App Store, we also use your search terms. We create groups of people, called segments, who share similar characteristics, and we use these groups for delivering targeted ads. Information about you is used to determine which segments you are assigned to, and therefore which ads you receive. To protect your privacy, targeted ads are delivered only if more than 5,000 people meet the targeting criteria. The information used to determine which ads are relevant to you is tied to random identifiers and not to your Apple ID.

If the Personalised Ads setting is turned on, Apple’s advertising platform may use your information to serve ads that are more relevant to you. If you do not want to receive ads targeted to your interests from Apple’s advertising platform, you can choose to turn off Personalised Ads. Turning off Personalised Ads will prevent Apple from using your information for ad targeting. It may not decrease the number of ads you receive, but the ads may be less relevant to you.

Learn more about Apple Advertising & Privacy at apple.com/au/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising.

Learn about how to opt out of personalised ads on the App Store, Apple News and Stocks at support.apple.com/kb/HT202074.

Sharing with Third Parties

We are obligated to provide some non-personal data to strategic partners that work with Apple to provide our products and services, help Apple market to customers, and sell ads on Apple’s behalf to display in the App Store and Apple News and Stocks. For example, we may share non-personal data about your content purchases with content owners so that they can measure the performance of their creative work, meet royalty and accounting requirements, and improve their products and services.

Applicable Legal Basis for Processing Personal Data

We process your personal data in the iTunes Store generally for performance of your contract with Apple, as necessary to provide the service and comply with our legal obligations. Where consent is the appropriate legal basis, we seek it in accordance with applicable local law.

Where applicable local law provides, we process personal data as necessary for purposes of our legitimate interests or those of a third party, in order to:

  • Display relevant content and assess whether your device has enough space to download requested content
  • Help improve and optimise the iTunes Store for you and others
  • Send you offers via email and push notifications that may be of interest to you, and to create segments to serve you ads in the iTunes Store
  • Provide reporting to content providers on purchases of their content
  • Prevent fraud and other malicious activity
  • The data used includes:
  • Your use of the iTunes Store app, such as your interactions with content you search for, view, download and purchase, as well as iTunes Store notifications
  • Details about your device and account
  • Your location and your IP address
  • The device trust score

Retention

We retain personal data associated with your purchases and downloads on the iTunes Store for the periods specified by applicable laws relating to financial reporting, which vary by region. For most customers, that requires at least a 10-year retention period, but in regions such as China that period can be 30 years. We also retain a record of your purchases and downloads of content for at least as long as you have an account with us to allow you to download that content again, in line with our applicable terms. We retain other information such as browsing activity and searches for a shorter period. The period chosen takes account of applicable legal requirements to retain data and specific business use cases. However, some information, such as purchases but not your stored card details, may be retained as business records even after you close your account or stop using the iTunes Store or other Apple online stores.

When you use a payment card, Apple may retain and automatically update your card number and billing information for future purchases, recurring transactions or other uses you authorise. Apple may obtain this information from your financial institution or payment network, and also use it for fraud prevention and verification.

Preventing Fraud and Other Malicious Activity

We also collect personal data to prevent fraud and other malicious activity in the iTunes Store and other Apple online stores, and other Apple apps and services. This information includes device information, such as device type and software version, location information (if available), download and purchase history, and other interactions with the stores. When you initiate a purchase, Apple may use information about your historical business relationship with Apple to process the request and determine whether to provide the product or service in advance of authorisation by the payment partner.

We also compute a device trust score on your device when you attempt a purchase using information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive. The submission is designed so Apple cannot learn the underlying values on your device. The score is stored for a fixed time on our servers.

At all times, information collected by Apple will be treated in accordance with Apple’s Privacy Policy, which can be found at www.apple.com/au/privacy

Published Date: September 18, 2023