Software company Elcomsoft accused Apple of storing deleted browsing history through iCloud's cross-device syncing feature. The deleted Safari browser history could allegedly stay with Apple for months or even over a year.

Elcomsoft CEO Vladimir Katalov said in an interview with Forbes that iPhone and iPad users have a false sense of security when they clear their Safari history. In reality, these records are kept in iCloud. Katalov explained that they busted iCloud when they developed cracking tools to extract protected data from iOS devices.

While Elcomsoft's approach in their investigation is not really plausible, it provided a glimpse of how vulnerable these traces of online activities are. iCloud keeps deleted data in a virtual record called "tombstone." While it is logical that Apple keeps these records for a time to ensure that all records can be deleted in-sync through all iOS devices, the main argument is the amount of time that Apple keeps them.

Elcomsoft's Phone Breaker software was also tested by Forbes and they were able to retrieve browsing history that dates back to November 2015 - a total of 7,000 supposedly deleted traces, according to MacRumors. Furthermore, Elcomsoft is not convinced that Apple actually purged the records. Katalov suspects that Apple moved the browsing data to another server that is not accessible from the outside through a software like Phone Breaker.

At any rate, it is very tough to crack Apple records even with Elcomsoft's software, so average iOS users need not worry. Forensic tools like Phone Breaker is not a software that can be downloaded just anywhere and it costs a fortune. Also Phone Breaker only works if the user knows the Apple ID and password or if an authentication token was extracted from the user's computer.