Apple kept the browsing history on iPhone, even once deleted – The Figaro

months and months Of browsing history on Safari were registered by Apple, according to the company’s cyber-security Russian ElcomSoft.

Apple kept in memory all the visited websites on Safari from its cameras, even after the browsing history is deleted. The Russian company ElcomSoft has made this discovery to Forbes. By launching one of the software extraction of data to iCloud designed by his company, Vladimir Katalov has been able to obtain a list of all sites visited in almost a year, since the Safari browser of his iPhone, and he had deleted the browser history.

The historical research of the journalist of Forbes.

The reporter from Forbes asked by Vladimir Katalov is loaned in the same year. The software has allowed him to unearth a list of sites visited in Safari (version 10.0.2 on Mac OS X) as from 27 November 2015. On the side of including URLS in a browsing history erased, appears the mention “deleted” (for “deleted”). Among the data available, the name of these same sites, as well as the frequency, date and time of their consultation.

The backup data on iCloud is supposed to be of benefit to the user of Apple devices, by allowing the sync of the devices and quick access to data in mobility. The experts contacted by Forbes attribute the fault observed by ElcomSoft a bug related to the synchronization of logs between different operating systems.

No official response has yet been made by Apple. Elcomsoft was keen to point out that the archiving of historical Web deleted was no longer relevant to this day. To guard against any risk, the iPhone and the Apple devices offer the possibility of avoiding the automatic recording of the history on Safari on iCloud.

The navigation data, once analyzed, can say a lot about the topics of interests, concerns, or even the state of health or sexual orientation of a user. A behavioural model based on the Web browsing and links of social networks has recently enabled a group of researchers from Stanford university to proceed with the identification of the persons tested. The main criticism to make of such an archiving of the part of Apple, even in the event of removal of such sensitive data, relates to the fact that backups to iCloud do not benefit from the encryption of end-to-end. The group therefore has access to this data and can be of benefit to the authorities, in the case of a warrant signed by a judge. Conversely, Apple may not directly access the data stored on an iPhone, because the key is stored locally. Witness the arm of iron around the smartphone killer of San Bernardino in the United States.

In November last year, Elcomsoft, had also demonstrated the automatic recording calls on iPhone on a server Apple, after the iCloud service activated, without the possibility for the owner of the phone to reject it. However, the company does not make express mention of the calls among the data that can be automatically saved on the cloud. “The automatic synchronization of calls in the cloud is a good thing as long as one is aware of and has an option to make it stop,” was then remarked Vladimir Katalov. His company had also noted that the duration of storage of the data related to FaceTime calls could rise to four months, against the 30 days advertised in a document detailing the terms and conditions of access to the data of the iPhone.