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In June 2016, Apple announced the acquisition of Data Siphon,

Oct. 27, 2017 by Ella Pickett

In June 2016, Apple announced the acquisition of Data Siphon, which collects and stores user data on up to 400 million individuals. The news of Data Siphon's acquisition prompted a wave of concern from privacy advocates and other privacy experts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"It's a big deal," said James Rosenblum, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology at the University of Connecticut. "This is a major deal. This is more important than ever. It's a big risk."

In the first week of the year, the US government started collecting phone records of millions of Americans. In January, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) began collecting phone records of 7.3 million Americans. The US government has been collecting phone records of over 300 million Americans for decades. The OPM also does its own surveillance on millions of Americans, including those of the US Supreme Court.

"It's absolutely outrageous that the US government has the power to collect Americans' telephone and other data for the purposes of surveillance," said Chris Voss, a lawyer and former assistant attorney general of the US attorney general, which oversees the Office of the General Counsel. "It is absurd, and I'm sure this administration will have to take action."

"What is going on here is a deliberate, coordinated effort to keep Americans from accessing sensitive information about them," wrote Michael Lederman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology at Fordham University. "Why should we trust the government in the first place?"

The government is attempting to keep us from having a choice between the information that we want and those that are not.