Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'
wired.com
wired.com
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.
If it's limited to local resurrection of the deleted photos, I'd see it as way smaller than what we had with CA.
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.
I'm more impressed that these areas of flash didn't get copied over with other data.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_upd...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> When you delete photos and videos, they go to your Recently Deleted album for 30 days. After 30 days, they'll be permanently deleted.
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.”
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.
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?
Which means all of their current emails, photos, contacts, bookmarks, browsing history, location etc was also available.
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.