Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-bug-resurfaced-fix-icloud/

by impish9208 • 2 years ago

59 50 2 years ago

wired.com

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

Wow this is a huge breach of trust for a company that claims it has strong privacy protections.

Also from a different article (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161152/apple-ios-17-pho...):

Another post claimed that old photos appeared on an iPad that was sold to another person.

It is SO weird for Apple to fix the bug in a patch but say nothing about the fact that photos deleted years earlier reappeared for a time. They absolutely must come clean here.

Aloisius2• 2 years ago

Em. The patch notes say that:

This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

Right but where were they resurrected from? A database (local or otherwise) that secretly keeps deleted photos forever? And if so why is it keeping them forever instead of actually deleting them?

akr4s1a2• 2 years ago

Heavy doubt on the sold to another person story. This sounds like a file was orphaned from its database entry and re-indexed. If you wipe your device like it was supposed to before you sell on your device, the data would be gone and it wouldn't have a remote source like iCloud to sync from either.

Tumbleweed1• 2 years ago

That seems like a massive invasion of privacy which I believe is illegal for them to do.

mingus88• 2 years ago

Can you explain your reasoning?

If the deleted file was not shared with anyone else, how is this a “massive invasion of privacy”

What law is being broken?

This is a bad bug for sure but there have been far worse bugs that have actually leaked PII and endangered peoples lives. What am I missing?

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

There are reports they reappeared on sold phones as well

ado__dev• 2 years ago

I wouldn't assume anything "deleted" is ever truly deleted. Just a deleted_at property set and maybe the data eventually purged after many years.

internetter3• 2 years ago

When I click "Permanently delete" in the Apple photos app, doing anything other than permanently deleting it is nothing short of a lie

Kirby64• 2 years ago

You’re in for a rude awakening then with most file systems then. Delete just means “unlink the pointer to it in the file system” for the vast majority of file systems. It might get deleted when it gets overwritten… sometime in the future maybe. I assume this is exactly what happened here.

kube-system5• 2 years ago

The default delete behavior is not that, and it is explicitly documented as such.

When you delete photos and videos, they go to your Recently Deleted album for 30 days. After 30 days, they'll be permanently deleted.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104967

disambiguation• 2 years ago

this, i always tell my junior devs that rm -rf is just flipping a flag and not to worry so much.

internetter3• 2 years ago

So, it seems like this is legit now? Last I checked it was in the "probably legit but unconfirmed" realm.

Apple needs to explain exactly what happened and how they plan to prevent it exactly now. They should be fined for storing photos after someone permanently deletes them. They should be forced to allow transparent access to the file system like on Android. This should be all over national TV.

This is bad. Really really bad.

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

It is definitely legit because Apple issued a fix (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160983/apple-iphone-ipa...). So they’ve acknowledged the behavior but not explained why it happened or confirmed that deleted now really means deleted.

internetter3• 2 years ago

I can't believe news about this is as quiet as it is. This should be on national television, like cambridge analytica (which honestly was probably not nearly as bad as this)

comboy• 2 years ago

How about the gov comes to you and tells you that you must keep all deleted photos on the device and that you must not tell anyone about this request.

ezfe3• 2 years ago

It's not "really bad" because they didn't store deleted photos, in general. A bug caused some not to be deleted properly.

HaZeust• 2 years ago

That is still really bad, what?

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

A compounding issue would be refurbished, handed down and resold devices.

None of the Apple devices have removable SSDs at this point, and many buyers rely on their resale value to shuffle devices every 2 or 3 years. That's a lot of devices in the wild with potentially resurfacing data.

kube-system5• 2 years ago

An android phone running ext3/4 likely doesn't delete the file when you press delete either.

freitzkriesler2• 2 years ago

I mean doesn't the file system simply mark a sector as "writeable" until something gets marked on it?

I'm more impressed that these areas of flash didn't get copied over with other data.

kibwen• 2 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40370078

grugagag• 2 years ago

If the photo never leaves the device this seems more like a feature dedicated to law enforcement whether that is for democratic or dictatorship type of governemnt forms. There still is a speck of privacy, the device itself. If LE cannot get hold of it then it’s undiscoverable. However if any photo leaves the device without any cloud settings on we’re talking about a complete lack of privacy.

brushfoot• 2 years ago

Discussion on Reddit before it was removed by r/ios mods:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_upd...

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

Why did the mods remove it? I hate that they have such insane censorship powers on Reddit, especially when many of the top subreddits are controlled by a small group of them.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Reddit is a joke now. It’s all either bots or mod-curated narratives.

123yawaworht456• 2 years ago

because even devoted sycophants can't rationalize it away with the usual mental gymnastics.

commoner• 2 years ago

Archive before deletion: https://web.archive.org/web/20240518030444/https://old.reddi...

sys_64738• 2 years ago

It's impractical to delete files from long term storage. Think about a file saved to long term data storage tape. How do you delete that? It would take aeons.

FireBeyond• 2 years ago

Are you implying when you restore a new iPhone from a cloud backup, Apple hits its tape storage vaults?

violiner• 2 years ago

Guess I'll get to see all those screenshots of my lock screen one last time.

amusingimpala75• 2 years ago

iOS 17.5.1 has addressed the issue, attributing it to a database corruption issue not properly deleting it the first time

Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

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