It's one reason we advise using search tools that don’t store your history." "It's vital that people are able to trust that they can be in control of that kind of information. It reveals people’s interests, concerns, worries and in many cases their every fleeting thought, as well as health information, information on their sexuality. "Browsing history is a very sensitive set of data. "Overall, assuming this was a mistake, it's a reminder that storing and retention of data is the default as a technical matter," Stanley said. Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said companies had to be very careful to follow best practice and delete users' data when requested. Effective encryption and a different design would help hide the information from both Apple and probing tools like Elcomsoft's Phone Breaker, the source added. The fact that Apple didn't hide the deleted records indicates it wasn't a purposeful data retention effort, but an oversight, according to the forensics expert. Consumer cloud services like iCloud, by their nature, require records of delete requests to remain accessible for stretches of time, as users may have devices turned off that need to come alive again before they can sync and remove the browsing history. It would appear to be a design issue rather than anything suspicious, and is likely to do with the syncing mechanism between iOS, Mac OS X and Apple servers. It's unclear just how or why Apple is storing cleared browsing history for such a long period. The expert also found Notes they'd supposedly deleted, but the Notes went back only a short period, less than 30 days, indicating Apple was purging them regularly. The expert, who asked to remain anonymous, found the Elcomsoft Phone Breaker tool recovered 125,203 browsing history records going back to the same 2015 date, even though the Safari cache had been cleared. Fresh Safari activity that I hadn't cleared was given the status "actual."įORBES also had an iOS forensics expert validate Katalov's claims. There were also Google searches, the full terms of which were visible in the Elcomsoft control panel. They were accompanied by a visit count as well as the date and time the history item was deleted. It returned nearly 7,000 "deleted" records going back to 27 November 2015. Your reporter tried clearing his Safari (version 10.0.2 on Mac OS X) history and then ran the Phone Breaker tool on his iCloud account. "We have found that they stay in the cloud, probably forever," Katalov claimed.
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