This was revealed by Russian provider of iPhone hacking tools, Elcomsoft, who said that anyone who buys an iPhone/iPad is automatically saving such data to the iCloud and there was no way to turn it off bar shutting down iCloud Drive altogether. And this is done without the iPhone/iPad owner’s permission. The call log includes phone numbers, dates, and length of calls, the Russian security firm said. “There is no way to hide your calls from government requests other than disabling iCloud Drive,” wrote Vlatamir Katalov, CEO of Elcomsoft, in a company blog post. iPhone/iPad users may particularly wary of this strange Apple feature as Apple has to provide such data to the law enforcement agencies as and when required. It can no longer hide behind the encryption curtain as this data is held unscrambled on the iCloud. The news report about Apple storing such call logs in iCloud came a tad late for FBI. Apple had decisively declined to assist FBI by handing over the encryption keys to the San Bernardino shooter, Rizwan Farook’s iPhone 5c. Though it can be debated that FBI didn’t know about this call log storage feature until the Russian firm publicly leaked it, it could have easily accessed Farook’s iPhone 5c call log with a help of legal warrant has been signed off by the Department of Justice. In addition to logging regular call history, Apple appears to be keeping records of metadata associated with FaceTime calls at least since the introduction of the iOS 8.2 version of its mobile software in March 2015, according to a report on The Intercept. Apple on its part says that the data is saved in iCloud for user convenience. However, it failed to explain how storing users call durations and other stuff can actually help the iPhone/iPad owner.
