Hacker News Reader

Comment by internetter | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

That is still really bad, what?

It's fairly bad in terms of triaging a software bug. But it's not particularly bad in terms of newsworthiness.

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.

The devices have full-disk encryption. That data is not recoverable without the passcode. If it’s been wiped it’s not recoverable.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com