I've always really hated how Apple (and a growing number of companies) are deliberately blurring the distinction between local and cloud storage. When I store a photo somewhere, I want to know where it is, on the device or in the cloud. When you look through Photos (and many other apps) this is not very clear. They're all just in this nebulous "Library" which could be actually anywhere.

I think a lot of people are uploading private pictures to the Internet without even being aware of it because of how tricky and sneaky companies are being, nudging you to Cloud-ify everything without explaining clearly that "Cloud" ultimately means "Posted to someone else's computer."

You're spot on. The lines are being blurred and it's already biting us.

"Cloud storage" does feel kinda magical to use. But it turns out it elides over some details that are kinda important.

The other half of the story is data loss. Will the files still be there if you leave them alone for a day or a year? Who knows?? Will they really be gone if you delete them? There's literally no way to tell!

When the whole celebrity nude leak thing happened a while back, my first instinct was to victim blame: "Why on earth would you do that? Upload your nudes to the Internet (iCloud)? Are you insane?" But, the UI absolutely doesn't help: It's not even remotely clear that when you take a photo, it's not going into some private library, but it's instead being uploaded. So you kind of have to have some sympathy. I'm sure a lot of people are fooled by this.

Imagine the privacy violations of refurbished iPhones. You buy an iPhone or get a trade in that’s a refurb and you suddenly have randoms “nudes” appearing in your recents? This can’t be right….

Refurbs are presumably factory-reset before resale, which in turn presumably includes zeroing out user storage. Presumably.

The issue in TFA is probably different. If files are only marked for deletion and their data never overwritten, it's conceivable they might show up again after a buggy update.

Of course, one would assume iOS would actually delete the data of files marked for deletion after some expiry, but it's also possible this wasn't happening.

Beyond deleting the reference to file , Delete the data on disk means one of two things : Overwrite with zeros or have another file contents written over it .

Overwrite with zeros is generally not done as default in flash memories to improve disk life, flash memories have a limited number of times they can be written too, so most memory controllers will try to distribute writes

This seems less a OS bug, more likely iOS/iCloud had a bug on marking deletion correctly

"Overwrite" on flash requires erasing the block containing the data you wish to overwrite, so pre-erasing blocks that will never be used again until rewritten doesn't reduce available write cycles, and can improve both endurance and performance.

Two potential issues when relying on flash erasure for privacy, neither of which apply to a full device wipe:

1. Filesystem allocation units are almost always smaller than flash erase blocks; erasing and rewriting, e.g., a 1MB flash block whenever a single 4 kB allocation unit it contains is freed will lead to performance and endurance problems.

2. On desktop and laptop systems, erase (ATA TRIM/SCSI UNMAP/NVMe Deallocate) operations are typically deferred to a low-priority or periodic background task for performance reasons; the same may apply to iOS devices.

In the case of full device wipes on modern Apple devices (iOS and Apple Silicon Mac), this is mostly moot anyway from a privacy perspective, because encrypted storage makes data effectively unreadable as soon as encryption keys are wiped.

Pretty sure its encrypted with your private key. There would be no way for someone else to ever see your data, unless I am totally misunderstanding how Apple does this.

I don't think this is an issue. It seems to be an iCloud-related bug based on just how long the reports claimed photos had been deleted. If you're signed out of iCloud, I'd expect the photo to not resurface.

Either way, horrible day for Apple's "Privacy First" charade.

> Yeah, I get that files aren't truly "deleted" until they're overwritten but these pictures didn't have their data messed with over 5+ years?

While the data may technically remain, unless the storage medium explicitly specifies otherwise (like E.G. snapshotting filesystems), "deleting" does often imply immediately overwriting enough metadata that it probably shouldn't be possible for the files to be trivially/accidentally resurfaced by a bug.

The internet is always permanent except when you want it to be.

I wish I could find the video I uploaded to YouTube when me and my friends were kids. I deleted it out of embarrassment when I was older but it was so funny. (Video involved us getting shocked by a CRTs capacitor on camera).

Also note that this could include every screenshot you’ve ever taken:

1. “Sync to iCloud” is enabled in Photos

2. You take a screenshot, it saves to photos, it syncs to iCloud

3. You delete the screenshot from Photos

…is there still a copy in iCloud? Maybe…