Apple’s Photo Bug Exposes the Myth of ‘Deleted’
Apple’s Photo Bug Exposes the Myth of ‘Deleted’
An Apple Photos glitch, now fixed, is a reminder that digital bits of your life will live on forever.
Didn't we all learn it long ago? They never delete.
Harddisks are cheap. Data are gold.
Yeah, but ignoring the delete requests, and storing the data puts them out of compliance with European and American deletion and retention laws. And if they were lying, and were using user photos to train models, they have more than enough non-deleted photos already.
I’m not pulling out my jump to conclusions mat quire yet. The database corruption issue sounds more reasonable. That stuff happens, and Apple isn’t zeroing data. Most people aren’t. Because the data isn’t zeroed, a file can resurrect when a corruption issue is remedied.
I learned that things you post online can never be deleted way in school.
The difference here is that the files aren't on Apples servers, they are on your phones internal disk. It is especially dangerous with Apple as you can't even run third party software.
The difference here is that the files aren't on Apples servers
Why would you think so?
The very first thing in the article photo goes like "delete from iCloud"
The difference here is that the files aren't on Apples servers, they are on your phones internal disk.
?
This is about files that are on iCloud servers. Specifically, some photos on iCloud servers don’t get properly flagged for deletion when the user requests it. Something was getting corrupted.
Apple fixed the corruption issue, so now a handful of photo files affected by it appeared to rise from the dead. The files were always there in the cloud, but something like a corrupted DB entry was hiding them from view. Users thought they were deleted, but they were in some sort of corruption purgatory. Not visible to the user, but still taking up storage space.
Once the corruption issue was remedied, the photo app recognized the files, didn’t realize they were previously flagged for deletion, then started to sync them to the device. AKA, download them.
And yes, you can run third party software on Apple’s operating system. There are quite a few third party apps for managing iOS and MacOS’s file system.
Big complaint isn’t a lack of 3rd party apps, it’s that it’s hard to side load apps that aren’t signed.
The bits written on mass sorage that are deleted remain there and are just marked as free storage until they get overridden by another file, this is how datarecovery works. Here, we have a similar case, where iOS hat a problem deleting the file from storage but managed to remove it from photos app index (storage is not marked as free, file could still be accessed if we had root file access but the link which pointed the photos app to the picture got removed). Now after some time, it can happen that the photo somehow gets detected (most likely as a safety measurement so that user don’t lose a picture if said link gets corrupted) and instead of deleting the file, de link gets repaired.
(Warning only a noob assumption)
Source: https://www.iphone-ticker.de/foto-panne-unter-ios-kein-fremdzugriff-aber-peinlich-fuer-apple-234979/
Exposes the "myth" of deleted I think is a bit much. They described it very well a good ways down:
One framework for thinking about the deletion of photos in the year 2024 is that it really has different levels. In Google’s documentation for its cloud services, for example, the company details its stages of deletion—the soft deletion, the logical deletion, the eventual expiration. The company says that in all cloud products, copies of deleted data are marked as available storage and overwritten over time. Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”
If your phone deletes a photo, say as a background process (after being in the trash for 30 days) and a bug prevents that space from eventually getting reclaimed, that data would persist even though it's "inaccessible". Fixing something else, may have made that data accessible again causing the issue people were seeing. Good to see they got it resolved though
Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”
This is how delete works on all disks and filesystems, SSD too. It just is marked as free in the fs tree. "Real" delete is called secure delete and is slow.
Every so often I scrub the free space of my drives to make sure I'm not retaining exploitable garbage data. Easier to do that once every week or so than to secure delete every file.
dinosaur disk drive
Ouch
Always SDelete in Windows and scrub in Linux
Pay wall:
Wait so these faceless corporations aren’t as invested in protecting my information as I was led to believe by their ridiculously well-funded marketing?
I mean, I clicked on “Agree” or “Yes” or whatever to that big long important screen they were so weird about.
I mean Android does a full wipe with zeros or a flash secure delete both of which will make your data extremely hard to get if not impossible.
Apple doesn't care about your privacy. They care about their image of caring about your privacy.
Anyone with a background in computing would respond, "duh." The operating system maintains a file table which contains the addresses of pieces of data on the disk. Deleting a file just removed its file table entry, and in most cases leaves the data untouched. That's why data recovery software exists, and it's also how we have the "Trash" or "Recycle Bin". If you want the photos completely erased, you'll need to overwrite the data, which wastes time and write cycles...
You're mixing up two things. In Trash, neither the pointers to the data, nor the actual data is deleted, they're just marked as deleted by moving them to a folder called Trash, or appending .trashed to their file name, which the file management part of the OS treats as trashed. If you clear your Trash, or directly delete the file permanently, the pointers are deleted so any data on the disk is marked as free to be overwritten, but until something actually overwrites it, you can recover it using data recovery software. If you change all the physical bits on the disk then the data is permanently deleted and can't be recovered. Unless, of course, it was copied to someone else's server first.
You're right, except that this is about years-old deleted pics. Like deleted-in-2021 old. The blocks on the partition have long since been overwritten.
It would be deleted if a factory reset actually did its job.
I'm not unconvinced this is a move to get people to throw away there old phones instead of creating a used market.
I wish I could write like y'all. You invent such great fantasies.
The VAST majority will never hear about this and will never be a consideration. Nobody at apple is running a secret "we won't wipe the device" team to sell more phones. That's paranoia.
You should also read the article because that would also tell you something about what is actually happening here.
Nerds looking for fodder to attack apple again. Batterygate 2 electric boogaloo.
The multi-gazillion corporation needs your protection now!🫡
I'll be the first to say that Apple should burn in a fire, and that this update fiasco is something that they should pay dearly for. However, there is also a computer literacy issue here where people think that deleting files actually removes the data from the hard drive. You need specialized tools to scrub deleted data off of a hard drive, and it can take a long time, depending on the amount of space being scrubbed.
I'm sorry reality doesn't align with your bitching 😭
Well this is the technology community. Kinda obvious we're all nerds here, and care about technology 🤷 and we don't really have to look hard lol