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Apple Says it Syncs Call Logs on iCloud As a 'Convenience to Customers' Amid Security Concerns
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If you have only an iPhone and no other Apple devices, there is actually no way for the user to tell that this is happening, and Apple doesn't inform them either.
Apple is willing to risk everything in a high-profile standoff with the FBI, and still gets ripped apart for maybe, possibly not protecting the fact that you punched in a phone number; Google takes every single bit of data from their users and turns it over to both governments and ad agencies, and nobody says a thing about it. Talk about a double standard
Ah, so it is ok when Apple does it but not other companies. I'm starting to see the MR logic here.
Yeah but the nice thing about it is that no one can get their hands on this data without doing something very illegal and it restores my call history on a new phone so I can call that one office back to schedule an appointment.
Every time I get a new iPhone (yearly) or do a DFU restore and set my phone up as "new" (I've done this a couple of times in the past few months), I have a bunch of old calls that show up in my call log - some of them are from 1-2 years ago! It's a random selection of calls in the call log and most of them are quite old (no recent calls). Again, this is after setting up the phone as "new" (not from a backup) and simply signing into iCloud.
This seems like a bug.
Apple, Google, and Facebook all have different incentives and business models. From left to right, the amount of spying increases. Also, Google and Facebook do say in their EULAs plenty of objectionable things, and Apple's products are known to be more protective of user privacy (e.g. iAds was refusing to give out enough user info to advertisers, so it was actually not making enough money).
Surely no diff from what phone company stores on their billing records and its been that way since the 90's and prob earlier
And it's not that something isn't being protected or something like that, the information is simply there part of the one's protected iCloud account.
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Disgusting that some fairly basic data is stored in one's iCloud account along with all kinds of other data that the iCloud account is used to store? Right...
There's always that small group that happens to know what they're talking about, e.g. people who work with big data and know what kind of things you can do with them and how EXTREMELY VALUABLE are your data and privacy.
While I agree that there should be an option for it, or at least wouldn't mind there being one, as far as call information being stored, it's not really much different than it already being stored by the carriers.
It's not about iCloud drive. The article even states the logs are kept even if iCloud backup is disabled.
It looks like the only way to keep the logs from being kept if to not have an iClould ID signed in on the device.
Except the iCloud login is normally an AppleID, right? So how do you add apps to the phone now without signing into it?
Except this is data stored as part of an account, not aggregated data or something that's simply available. It's like email on an email server essentially, especially when it comes to various online email providers.
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iCloud backup and iCloud Drive are different things. What that post was mostly referring to is that when logged in with the same iCloud account on different devices the call logs would seem to be shared and appear on all devices, but with iCloud Drive disabled, that seems to get rid of that sharing.
Not really since:
The reality is that there's no way, short of signing out of iCloud, to disable this. I know because I have iCloud Drive disabled and my call data syncs.
However, this isn't a big secret. If a person has more than one iOS device, they'd have to be clueless to not notice that their call history is syncing. I noticed years ago. And people super concerned about privacy will use other tools to prevent logging, tracking, etc.
I do wish Apple would let us toggle every aspect of syncing on/off. Even if they buried less-used stuff in a submenu. I want Safari bookmarks to sync, but not browsing history; for example.
It's different in the sense that it may be accessible more easily (e.g. by extracting an authentication token from your computer) and by parties that otherwise would not be able to serve a warrant to a carrier, such as hackers and foreign governments.
As an example, consider that the iCloud account of the head of the Clinton presidential campaign, John Podesta, was hacked (probably by Russian intelligence). Using the new tool from Elcomsoft, they could have easily extracted not only his emails, but also the call records and contacts. And who knows how many other accounts are being hacked without it becoming public ...
I want my call history to be restored when I restore a new iPhone from an iCloud backup. That's part of what makes restoring from an iCloud backup such a positive experience. Keep syncing away, Apple.
If you don't like the fact that Apple syncs your call history in iCloud, turn iCloud backup off on your device and go back to syncing with iTunes and encrypt the backup.
If you don't like the fact that Apple syncs your call history in iCloud, turn iCloud backup off on your device and go back to syncing with iTunes and encrypt the backup.
The call history syncing happens regardless of whether you use iCloud Backup or not. The Macrumors article is a bit misleading in that regard.
Yeah, MR actually only has one poster "MR", who posts under thousands of different names. It's all actually just this one guy.