iCloud was storing cleared browsing histories

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/9/14559376/apple-icloud-cleared-browsing-history-stored

by shawndumas • 9 years ago

129 65 9 years ago

marricks• 9 years ago

That's not good, but at least they had this going for them?

Unlike most iCloud data, the records don’t seem to have been accessible to law enforcement requests. Apple declined to comment when reached by The Verge.

yakult• 9 years ago

I would like more clarification as to what this means. Does this mean the histories are purely client-side? If that's not the case, I don't see how they can make this claim.

9gunpi2• 9 years ago

If that's not the case, I don't see how they can make this claim.

Nobody knew it was even available?

gilgoomesh• 9 years ago

That whole sentence seems mistaken since no iCloud data is available to law enforcement. iCloud is AES encrypted with keys that are held by the user-only (not Apple).

As people have pointed out, yes, Apple is a trusted part of the system and could release a new iOS/macOS update that captures these keys but short of that, neither Apple nor law enforcement have any access to your iCloud data.

neotek• 9 years ago

Sounds like a mistake rather than some nefarious data collection strategy.

Apple doesn't rely on advertising revenue like Google or Facebook so in the past they've been much more likely to avoid collecting data whenever it could get in the way of their self-professed privacy narrative.

kartickv• 9 years ago

Storing data on Apple's cloud services is a privacy risk given their inability to keep it secure. We had the celebrity iCloud hack, caused at least in part by Apple not using 2FA for iCloud logins. And now this privacy failure.

Storing your data on a cloud service that isn't competent is a privacy risk.

And a reliability risk, as I found out last year when my albums on iCloud Photos disappeared. Not the photos themselves, just the albums in which I organised them, but organising data can take a lot of time, and any data loss is unacceptable. They weren't in trash.

Apple's "self-professed privacy narrative" is partly right, but partly marketing, and partly disingenous, as if collecting data has no other purpose than advertising: https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience To be clear, I'm not taking a black-and-white view; it's partly right, partly wrong.

BTW, The Verge wasn't clear — was the forensics firm getting data from an iDevice or Mac's local storage, or across the Internet from iCloud servers?

izacus2• 9 years ago

Apples approach to security is nicely summarized by the fact, that you're not allowed to use 2FA for iCloud at all on a Mac if you don't own an iPhone.

Anechoic• 9 years ago

We had the celebrity iCloud hack, caused at least in part by Apple not using 2FA for iCloud logins.

iCloud has offered 2 step authentication since 2013 [0]. From what I can tell, the celeb hack happened a few weeks before the public release in mid-2014.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2013/03/21/apple-beefs-up-icloud-apple-i...

onion2k• 9 years ago

Apple's iAd advertising network only closed down a few months ago. They still have searchads for their apps stores and iTunes. Advertising isn't a big part of their business, but they do have good reason to collect data for targeting.

r721• 9 years ago

That's why I'm wary of browser sync as a concept. Maybe it's not as convenient, but I would better transfer bookmarks as an export file, and passwords as a password manager encrypted container. As for browsing history I'm not even sure it has any long-term importance - useful browsed links can be bookmarked, saved to delicious/diigo/pinboard, tweeted, upvoted on reddit/hn, whatever.

CaptSpify2• 9 years ago

FF used to have browser-sync that you could send to your own server. Last I checked they had disabled it, but I wish it could be revitalized.

dvfjsdhgfv• 9 years ago

Has anyone heard about an open source extension doing the same thing?

pmontra• 9 years ago

I didn't try but it doesn't seem to be disabled. They have two guides

Self hosted sync server https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html

Self hosted accounts server https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-fxa.html#howto-...

The latter includes instructions about how to add the accounts server url to about:config

veeti• 9 years ago

Both the old and new sync encrypt all data before storing it on the server.

feelix2• 9 years ago

If you're concerned about artifacts being left around, then you should also know that there is a log file of every file you've ever downloaded, including in private browsing mode. You can see it with this: https://macdaddy.io/cleandisk/

skissane2• 9 years ago

Today I learned that $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV2 is a sqlite database. The LSQuarantineEvent table contains every file you ever downloaded, the source URL is in the LSQuarantineDataURLString column.

sqlite3 $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV2 'select LSQuarantineDataURLString from LSQuarantineEvent'

sqlite3 $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV2 'delete from LSQuarantineEvent'

petrikapu2• 9 years ago

Select gives me 22 rows. I'm pretty sure I've download much more. Maybe per session?

Udo_Schmitz2• 9 years ago

Interesting. But I see only fairly old stuff there. And I'd guess only downloads from a single day or week a few years ago.

justinclift• 9 years ago

It's directly loadable using a GUI too (eg sqlitebrowser.org), for anyone that prefers the graphical approach.

And yeah, it had all kinds of interesting stuff I've downloaded over the years in mine. Now cleared. ;)

Udo_Schmitz2• 9 years ago

Won't even start without admin password, I'll pass.

9gunpi2• 9 years ago

Apple engineers are not different from the rest of people - deliver first, fix when fails. Wiping tombstones in constantly-syncing environment is a cumbersome piece of engineering.

furyg3• 9 years ago

After a crash Safari is nice enough to restore your open windows and tabs... I've noticed several times that it's also nice enough to re-open your private browsing windows, too. That throws up some red flags for me.

M4v3R• 9 years ago

Well to be honest they don't say that the browser doesn't store your browsing data temporarily. As a matter of fact it has to do that in order to provide you with caching, cookies and local storage for your private browsing session. Normally this data gets wiped out when you close the window, but when the browser crashes it doesn't have chance to do so, so they restore the windows for you so you can make the decision whether to close them or not.

devwastaken3• 9 years ago

As a matter of fact it has to do that in order to provide you with caching, cookies and local storage for your private browsing session.

This is solved by knowing what is stored is private browsing data, which should be marked anyways. Safari just isn't that well thought out of a browser.

abalone2• 9 years ago

That's a MacOS thing, not just a Safari thing. Windows stay open until you close them, even across restarts. MacOS, like iOS, has mostly retired the concept of "quitting an app kills state".

(You can go back to the old behavior via a system setting: "Close windows when quitting an app")

Nullabillity• 9 years ago

Storing stuff on disk that should be kept purely in-memory is a Mac thing?

saurik• 9 years ago

This feature isn't some kind of evil magic... it isn't like it is serializing the virtual memory state of the entire process to disk in the style of unexec(): programs have to manually decide what they think matters for their suspension state; correspondingly, if this happens, Safari would have to be incorrectly saving information that the user clearly doesn't expect or want.

dTal2• 9 years ago

What is "quitting" then? How much state is stored? Between "no state" (window is a dead bitmap) and "all the state" (program is simply paused) is a lot of wiggle room.

j_s2• 9 years ago

As long as this functionality is documented on the incognito start page, similar to "doesn't make you anonymous" warnings, it seems fine (by design) to me.

If anyone has any pointers to documentation on the forensics aspects of this I'd appreciate a link.

It doesn't look like there's that much open source available for the new-ish Windows 8+ hibernation file: https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility/issues/25

throwaway20482• 9 years ago

Why would anyone find this behaviour desirable? We should ask that before going to the "If its documented its the user's fault" truncheon.

VeejayRampay• 9 years ago

Doesn't matter, it's Apple and not Microsoft or Google, all is forgiven.

driverdan• 9 years ago

Original, non-blogspam article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/02/09/apple-...

leecarraher• 9 years ago

backup system probably supports do not follow links, just need to add safari cache to the list. seems pretty innocuous. And if you are doing illegal stuff in your non-private browsing session, on a device that automatically backs up all of your data to the cloud... pretty sure you've left plenty of paper trail elsewhere.

iCloud was storing cleared browsing histories

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