This is a question for American members of the EEVBlog board, please could someone explain the rules behind use of square brackets in American English? By way of an example I quote the following post which has just appeared on Slashdot:
It's no secret Apple [is] on a privacy bent as of late. But that extends inside of Apple as well with various internal groups fighting for access to user data and often being denied by Apple's "privacy czars" who ensure Apple doesn't collect information they don't [need], that information is used only [in] ways the user allows, and to design the systems to keep user data separate. This has lead to many conflicts, especially for the Siri and iAd team who often cannot access [the] user data they need. Of course, Apple can do this because unlike Google, Facebook or [Amazon], Apple makes money on hardware and not on the sale of customer data.
Remove those brackets and the passage makes sense, so why are they there?