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.
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)
There is a reasonable chance that it's a bug happening locally. It would still be really bad, but that would rule out gov. intervention theories, iCloud keeping everything even when the user deletes it, and would also rule out wide spread sharing of these photos.
If it's limited to local resurrection of the deleted photos, I'd see it as way smaller than what we had with CA.
It happens all of the time, which is how data recovery tools work on 'deleted' data. But I doubt this particular instance was a file system bug. Probably a bug in the 30-day delete scheduling that happens by default in the Recently Deleted album in Photos.
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.
There's zero actual evidence this is the case and the failure mechanism would extend FAR beyond photos if it were. One post claims they wiped a device and photos came back but I hesitate to trust a single person on the internet.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
I imagine the database corruption prevented the permanent delete from the Recently Deleted folder that's supposed to happen 30 days after you mark something as deleted.
If it behaves anything like the Mac Photos app, then it's using hard links for things like importing photos which can lead to bugs like this if the corruption led to them losing track of one of the hard links, since you have to delete all of them to actually delete the file.
That’s a reasonable explanation. Still, they need to be a lot more transparent about what happened and confirm explicitly that those files are deleted now and that in general, files are permanently deleted. I feel like all too often, Apple just stays silent on issues and avoids any semblance of customer support, and that needs to change.
Most likely the "secret database" is just the filesystem. Keeping things forever is the default behavior of filesystems.
A photo library application is just a database pointing to files in the file system. In some cases photos were deleted from the library database without being deleted from the filesystem. That's the bug.
The consequences are that: 1) the photo appears to be deleted to the user, who goes by what the application tells them 2) the photo appears to be deleted to the application, who goes by what the database says, and 3) the photo miraculously reappears when the filesystem is re-indexed by the application.
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.
Hasn't been that way in a decade. If you use nand flash there's a huge chance you're using trim which will periodically overwrite "not in use" blocks to avoid a write penalty later as writing to an empty page is much quicker.
However, "unlink the pointer" has been good enough for ages.
The data is effectively deleted short of an application having the privileges to read the underlying raw block device and having an understanding of the raw filesystem structures to be able to search though that unallocated, raw space and reconstruct file entries.
No application outside of special-purpose data recovery apps (and even then you'd need to run them with elevated privileges) would have any reason to be capable of this, so in practice a deleted file means it is deleted from the perspective of the vast majority of applications.
Similarly, SSD TRIM is also irrelevant - TRIM'med space is hidden from the host. Sure, an intentional tool exploiting some undocumented vendor command or side-channel could probably recover it but again you'd have to do this intentionally.
If you then delete from the Recently Deleted album it says that the photo “will deleted the selected photos from iCloud and all connected devices”.
Additionally, at least in iOS 17.5, the Recently Deleted album itself has a disclaimer at the bottom that says that “items will be permanently deleted. This may take up to 40 days.”
iCloud is a pile of crap with eventual consistency everywhere, including some really extreme interpretations of "eventual": I've had deleted "favorite places" on Maps persist for years. Deleting them would hide them from the local device, yet restoring a brand new device would bring them back.
The whole thing feels like it's running on duct tape, wishful thinking and a large chunk of non-technical users that would blame themselves rather than the shitty tech when weird things like this happen.
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.
My instinct is also to assume they didn't reset their phone, but I also assumed Apple deleted their photos when they deleted them years ago.
I wouldn't be shocked to find it there's some technical cruft around it being a built in mandatory app, and corrupted data was retained.
In fact, when I think about it, if I wasn't biased towards Apple, my prior after a bug involving photo deletion should be to expect bugs involving photo deletion.
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.
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.