Does your Internet history actually delete?

Me and my friend were having a debate on wether your iPhone Internet history is erased forever. Is this true? I said It wasn't but we need to know the truth.

Yes it does erase

Yeah but the server logs are another creature, hehe.

Technically no it's not erased forever because safari has a history.plist file that is not deleted when you delete your history and you can recover it with certain softwares and tools.

No, the nsa is spying on you. Ha ha ha.