It restoring deleted photos onto wiped devices that have been resold is a privacy nightmare.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Privacy
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That's unnecessarily clickbaity, the article doesn't mention it's specifically nudes that came back, just old photos.
I was wondering about that (but thought that that what you said would probably be true), this would have been very interesting if it just restored nudes ...
The person who started the thread claimed that NSFW photos they had deleted “years ago” were back on their phone.
Another Reddit user said that they saw photos from 2016 show up as new images but that they didn’t think they’d ever deleted them. And a person claimed in a later post that “around 300” of their old pictures, some of which were “revealing,”
I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple’s CSAM scanning. You know, hang on to the photos as evidence, and, for an added bonus, sell more iCloud storage because the “System Data” now exceeds the free iCloud data storage quota. Win-win!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some iPhone owners are reporting that, after updating their phones to iOS 17.5, their deleted photos — some quite old — are popping up again, according to a Reddit thread that MacRumors spotted.
People reporting the apparent bug say that they’re seeing old photos appear in their Recents album after Monday’s update.
iOS does give users the option to restore deleted photos, but after 30 days, they’re supposed to be permanently removed.
The person who started the thread claimed that NSFW photos they had deleted “years ago” were back on their phone.
And a person claimed in a later post that “around 300” of their old pictures, some of which were “revealing,” appeared on an iPad they’d wiped per Apple’s guidelines and sold to a friend.
Computer data is never actually “deleted” until it’s overwritten with new 1s and 0s — operating systems simply cut off references to it.
The original article contains 337 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 56%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
And a person claimed in a later post that “around 300” of their old pictures, some of which were “revealing,” appeared on an iPad they’d wiped per Apple’s guidelines and sold to a friend.
How would that even work? Wiping a device resets the encryption keys, doesn't it?
It actually doesn’t seem possible as there are too many systems that need to fail for it be true. The encryption key, access to another Apple ID and Photos having access to it all.
We are finding out that it’s not the images that are restored, but the thumbnails. Which is why the images are low quality when opened. The original photos are gone but the thumbnails still survive on Apple’s servers. Likely just cached. Which of course only applies to those logged into their accounts, not on other wiped devices.
It sounds like these aren't still on the device somewhere, but re-downloaded from iCloud.
So presumably the device ID is somehow being used to incorrectly "authenticate" to iCloud and old images are being restored.
This definitely raises some major concerns about how iCloud authentication works.
I'm sure this is a dumb programming error (files are not deleted until overwritten with new data with solid state media). A boneheaded fuckup. Another person reported old voicemails being flagged as new. Either way, I'm waiting to upgrade to this version as a result.
File systems have a record where the binary data for a file like a photo is stored. That's deleted, without that you'd have to extensively scan the whole memory and hope to recognize that a chunk is an image file.
Whatever Apple is did in this update, it's probably not good
If it is indeed a boneheaded mistake, then it’s probably because of over reliance on RPC-type calls from the front-end that displays the data, to the back-end that actually handles the data. User deletes photo, and the front-end, instead of actually deleting it, tells the backend to do it… and then hides the photo from view, maybe updates its index of photos marking them as “deleted” regardless of whether the backend actually deleted the photo.
Then an OS update comes along, and rescans the filesystem, and report a bunch of new photos to the front-end, that then happily add them to the GUI to the user’s surprise.
Modern APIs and software architectures are a bloated, unnecessarily complex mess, and this is the result.
It's quite possible, although I'm inclined to blame it on turnover and pressures for deadlines
I've come to see software kinda like a plant. If you neglect it, it rots, because all software is contextual and the world moves on. If you keep growing it, it starts to rot from the inside. If you carve out down to something smooth and streamlined, it can last a long time and just need TLC to bounce back
Ultimately, if you want something to be big and to last, you have to prune it, transplant it, and continuously work on it. There's no direct money to be made there though
And it helps a shit ton to have people around long-term. It can take years to learn a big stack, but having someone go "wait, if we do this we need to rexamine how we delete photos" is how you avoid fuck ups like this
Wow, beautiful analogy! I’m going to use that in my professional career if you don’t mind. Also with your permission I’d like to give you credit with a link to this comment, if that’s OK with you, of course.
Some unit tests might have been lacking. But yea. I personally like to keep things simple, but a lot of tech companies seem to prefer quite the opposite sometimes
laughs in DOS
I hope we will get to the bottom of this, because all the armchair experts with tons of different explanations for how this happened are annoying. There are so many people confidently explaining different conflicting theories.
Apple, or as I've taken to call it, Mother Superior.
I didn't use a single Apple device and I wouldn't do it anyway so who cares..
so who cares
All the other people who do use one?