Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/apple-bug-restored-photos-that-users-deleted-where-did-they-come-from.html
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Bug… or feature? Data recovery at no extra cost!
And it would surprise me if there isn’t a clause deep, deep inside the T&C that makes it okay for Apple to do this, accidentally or deliberately, “because the user agreed to this”.
I’m so tired of this bullshit.
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Small advertisement child: “what’s a computer?”
iOS engineering team: “what’s a file system?”
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This isn’t new, from my time using a Mac in college I would have to delete files on my external drive twice. Once in the folder and then again as hidden files, otherwise you’d have hidden ghost files taking up space that should’ve been cleared up
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I could see this happening if backups were deltas, and they stepped back to a point in time, or it could be they applied the legal hold framework to some people’s photos (you can delete things, but they won’t be deleted from the vault)…
It definitely doesn’t answer the why question, which I think is probably a much more pertinent one, and especially the part which answers, how do they benefit from this?
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It’s not that shocking from a technical point of view.
Their storage system has to cater to a large number of users, distributed around the world, who store mostly immutable large objects (pictures and videos) and share them with other users.
For this scenario, you really don’t want the resource usage to grow as an object gets reshared, so content-adressable storage is the way to go.
Also, for the metadata, we now live in the era of plentiful RAM, meaning IO time is dominated by writes, and SSDs, where erasing is more costly than writing to an empty location. This makes log-structured storage a lot more efficient.
In such a system, you have to spend quite a bit of resources to delete objects; actually rewriting the metadata is costly, and as long as you are not running out of space, deleting the actual storage is more trouble than it’s worth.
So it doesn’t necessarily stem from a malicious intent; might be a purely technical decision.
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Files don’t really get deleted, just the reference to the file does. This includes iCloud. If your DB of file references gets corrupted, the recovery from that corruption may actually restore old references.
I believe the story about the files being recovered after wiping the device and giving it to someone else has been debunked.
If the device doesn’t have your encryption key, then it can’t recover your file from iCloud, so there is literally no way this could happen on a wiped device that you gave to someone else with a different iCloud account (therefore different encryption keys).
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The funnest hypothesis I saw was along the lines of “it’s literally on enormous magnetic backup tapes in a datacenter with data for 1000 other people, sometimes that tape might actually be loaded for whatever reason, “deleting” anything you put in the cloud will never be more than a legal abstraction”
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Yeah, this is how Time Machine backups work, so perhaps it just mimics Apple’s iCloud architecture locally. It’s also made very clear that deleted pictures are held in a folder for 30 days, so I wonder how old some of these images were? You can go in and “double delete” images in that folder, but if you don’t they’re still sitting there.
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I am convinced they do this on purpose so that people’s phones fill up, compelling them to want to buy a new one. This problem has been going on for years, I noticed this phenomenon myself while attempting to manually delete photos to clear storage space.
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I have had photos manually deleted from the deleted photos folder reappear later, going back to my iphone 5.
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You gotta delete the deleted pics ad nauseum, it’s deleted folders all the way down.
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This story’s already outdated. Apple has attributed the issue to incomplete deletions in some past OS version due to database corruption (as @algae13 hinted), with the latest iOS upgrade accidentally recovering them. Yesterday they released an even newer iOS point release (17.5.1) that claims to fix the problem. See MacRumors for example.
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There is no clause in the terms and conditions, no item in a contract, that could make this legal in the EU.
It’s that simple.
Now, will they hold the execs personally, financially, and criminally responsible? That’s the question that we unfortunately know the answer to.
Tim Crook in chokie I can get behind.
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No. They cannot, not through software deletion. You can render it theoretically unrecoverable, but you can never be 100% sure.
There are some ways that are slightly more reliable than others, though …
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At least they had tools to wipe those hidden files easily. Now?
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Wait, the company doesn’t have one of those clauses in their TOS that all data stored by their service belongs to them? 
Thought that was tech firm standard by now, along with the bits about selling it for fun and profit… mostly the profit part. 
Next the folks in online stock photos will seem more realistic and familiar. 
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I wouldn’t trust the Verge for reporting adequately on tech problems. Go to the discussion at arstechnica if you want to understand what the actual problem was. Hint: it’s not as bad as the Verge makes it sound, especially it’s not like any photo anyone ever took on their iPhone is still recoverable.
It appears this has been thoroughly debunked already. See the link above.
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