Deleted Safari browsing histories were kept for well over a year
Apple has been storing Safari browsing histories in iCloud , even after they’ve been ‘deleted’ by the user, with such records being kept going back to 2015 – although apparently this was an accidental by-product of the way the cloud syncing system works rather than anything malicious, and the issue has now been fixed.
This information first came to light in a Forbes report, which cited Vladimir Katalov, the chief executive of Elcomsoft, a Russian security firm (which focuses on password/system recovery).
Katalov stumbled onto the issue when reviewing the browsing history on his iPhone , when he discovered his supposedly deleted surfing history still present in iCloud, being able to extract it by using his company’s Phone Breaker tool.
Forbes itself replicated this discovery, finding their own surfing records going back to November 2015 (including Google searches of which the terms used were fully visible).
