In addition to the types of data mentioned in other replies, they also have:

- Mail and calendar for people who use the iCloud services.

- Reminders.

- All documents (e.g. Pages, notes) synced to iCloud.

True, but compared to google or facebook, apple has almost no user data.

Are you sure? I think it's definitely a significant enough amount to be mentioned with the others either way.

Not to mention the fact that a users interaction with Facebook is completely different from their interaction with Apple. Most people keep especially private data off of Facebook, but practically no I-phone user stops to think if a photo might be incriminating/embarrassing in the future before they take it. And that's just Photostream.

People backing up their devices to iCloud stand to lose even more.

Enough to be mentioned. To be used as the primary example and including Google as others?! Sounds more like an author that is getting paid for every Apple mention in an article title.

Every push notification ever sent and the data it holds. Text messages, location data, credit cards, addresses and even backups. Apple's data mines are virtually endless.

Billions of text messages.

iPhone location data of millions of people?

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/10/your-iphone-knows-whe...

800 million credit cards on file.

That's extremely valuable data to Apple and a great target for criminals, but I'm not sure the government would have much interest in it.

This should be qualified with: since they already have it via credit card companies. You give your social security number when getting a credit card for a /lot/ of reasons. And these tend to be a good reasons.

The majority of Apple's revenue is from outside the US. I have no idea what proportion of their credit card data is from outside the US, but we don't have these ID numbers. http://www.worldofapple.com/archives/2014/01/27/apple-posts-...

Why do Apple need to keep your voice recordings for 2 years? http://www.wired.com/2013/04/siri-two-years/

1) It actually tells you why in the article and 2) She's asking why a particular question isn't answered in a FREQUENTLY ASKED questions section but is under the settings. That's kind of the point of an FAQ - to only answer frequently asked questions.

that is why I pointed to this article, but the reason I asked this question was to let everyone know (who didn't already know) because I think it is important.