14 DAY TRIAL // Apple might be storing deleted user notes in iCloud even after the 30-day grace period, according to Russian software firm ElcomSoft, which managed to retrieve notes that were 2 years old.
The Cupertino-based iPhone maker automatically places deleted user notes in iCloud in a dedicated folder called “Recently Deleted,” and these are being kept for 30 days before allegedly getting deleted forever.
Apple is thus giving its users the possibility of restoring a specific note should they change their mind in the 30-day grace period, but it looks like the company is sometimes holding these notes even longer without users actually seeing them in their iCloud accounts.
ElcomSoft says it managed to extract notes from iCloud accounts using its own Phone Breaker application, and it discovered that some of them were older than 30 days and weren’t supposed to be there.
No word from Apple just yet
What’s more, one of the notes that it extracted was from 2015, so it was approximately 2 years old. ElcomSoft says the age and number of notes that can be extracted varies by account, and it’s not yet clear if there’s a pattern or some accounts are saving more notes than others even before the 30-day grace period.
“While some of our test accounts did indeed contain deleted notes going all the way back to 2015, some other accounts contained much less than that. In several cases, we’ve been able to access two weeks worth of deleted notes (still, this is two weeks *after* the 30-day retention period). We need larger base to make any conclusions,” the Russian company says.
This isn’t the first time the Russian company comes across bugs in Apple software and services, and almost every time, the Cupertino firm addressed the reported problems in record time.
Back in 2016, ElcomSoft discovered that it was possible to access encrypted iTunes backups and extract data, with Apple delivering a patch shortly after that. More recently, the firm revealed that Apple was saving unauthorized Safari data in iCloud, triggering another patch from Apple.
At this point, there’s no statement from Apple regarding the deleted users notes in iCloud, but there’s a good chance a new fix would be delivered this week as well.