Makes sense for photos that users have explicitly stored on Apple servers. But I got the impression that the article on “The Verge” was about photos that users had only knowingly stored only on their iPhone. (The Boing article is unclear about where they are stored.)
Yes. But if we’re talking about photos stored only on the phone, any phone operating system that respects privacy will have an easily accessible “Secure Delete” option, which allows the user/owner to effectively say “Spend the considerable resources required to make sure this object is really deleted.” If that option isn’t available, then the user/owner of the phone is effectively not the owner of the data on it.
Also, if following lizard-of-oz’s useful link to the Ars Technica post, note that at least one poster in that discussion thinks its about photos stored on iCloud rather than only stored on the phone.
I don’t think that is the case here. Even if the bug at hand were affecting iCloud, which it isn’t.
Apple charges money for iCloud. If you share something, it’s copied and counts against somebody else’s quota. If that is exceeded, people upgrade their plan or delete stuff.
Adding the kind of complexity you describe for that use case is stupid and does not even save a lot of money: storage is cheap, and we’re not talking about a social media site where most content is shared across thousands of accounts, only a fraction of the content is shared at all, and to only a few people.
For what exactly? For giving a few people local access to a file that they deleted years ago, but that got lost before the 30 days ran out in which they could have recovered it?
I mean, that happened as a bug on top of a fix where they restored access to photos that users didn’t delete but got
lost due to a bug.
There are many things that Apple execs should be held responsible for. But for this?
