In other blog post, we discussed the updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker that allows extracting search and browsing history, location data and call logs from users’ Microsoft Accounts. Now let’s talk about the origins of this data and how to enable its collection on different devices – even if they don’t run Microsoft Windows.

Even before we released Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, you’ve been able to download users’ location data from Google. What you would get then was a JSON file containing timestamped geolocation coordinates. While this is an industry-standard open data format, it provides little insight on which places the user actually visits. A full JSON journal filled with location data hardly provides anything more than timestamped geographic coordinates. Even if you pin those coordinates to a map, you’ll still have to scrutinize the history to find out which place the user has actually gone to.