In a report published on Wednesday, The Intercept has drawn attention to a glaring flaw in tech giant Apple's iMessage chatting service, revealing that Apple gets to see the phone numbers to which an iMessage user is sending a message.

According to the report, Apple apparently does not know what a message sent out by an iMessage user precisely says, because it claims that "iMessage is encrypted end-to-end." However, the company can definitely see the phone numbers to which the user is considering sending a message.

The report has disclosed that Apple can see the recipients of message sent by an iMessage user because, immediately after the recipient's phone number is typed by the sender of a message, the iMessage service pings the company's servers to find out whether the phone number represents another iOS device.

If the message has been sent to the user of an iOS device, Apple sends that message using its own service, with the message appearing in a blue bubble. However, if the message has been sent to a non-iOS device, that message is sent as a standard text message which gets displayed in green.

The Intercept's report basically implies that though Apple has, over the last few years, been persistently reiterating that it has very little customer data stored on its servers, the company surely has some information which can be utilized by law enforcement.