Apple wants their customers to know that privacy is still a priority.

On June 6, the internet exploded in a wave of controversy surrounding high-profile news leaks about PRISM, a top-secret National Security Agency surveillance program with potentially-unconstitutional implications. The program, supposedly meant to monitor the activity of immigrants and determine possible terrorist threats, gives the NSA power to produce covert court orders and demand customer or user information from a number of big-name websites and companies, including Google, Facebook, and Apple.

Since information about PRISM began to leak to the press, the federal government has taken a good bit of heat. The general public of is furious, and PRISM, though its exact uses have remained in shadow, still seems like a thinly-veiled attempt by the government to spy on unsuspecting citizens.

While the controversy has hit the government hardest of all, however, it has also resulted in negative backlash for the likes of Facebook and Apple, who have come under fire in the past week for complying with the NSA and allegedly passing personal data and other sensitive information on to government officials. On Friday, Facebook responded to accusations of breached customer agreements and privacy policies, and on Monday, Apple followed suit, issuing their rebuttal to the PRISM disaster in a blog post titled “Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy.”

In the blog, Apple assures customers that any requests made by the government under PRISM were scrutinized individually for their level of appropriateness and overall legality. And in situations where Apple did feel obliged to share customer information, the blog reasons, the company still tried to respect their users, passing on as narrow a selection of data as possible to fulfill the government requests.

The blog post also noted that, unlike companies such as Google and Facebook, Apple does not make a point of preserving every last vestige of their customers’ private communications. iMessage and Facetime chats, for example, are encrypted so that they can only be viewed by those actually participating in the conversations. Apple is incapable of decrypting those communications, and as a result, none of them have been stored or passed along to NSA representatives. Apple’s policy of leaving some user data unrecorded also applies to several other mobile device functions, such as location settings, searches made through the maps app, or any information inquiries run through Siri.

“Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place,” Apple wrote in the blog post. “There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.”

Monday’s announcement also revealed more about the nature of the NSA requests, stating that Apple received between four and five-thousand data requests–relating to nine or ten-thousand user accounts–between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Reasons given for information requests ranged from criminal investigations to suicide preventions. Apple was not permitted to mention PRISM’s role in relation to matters of national security.