Didn't we all learn it long ago? They never delete.
Harddisks are cheap. Data are gold.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
358 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59495 readers
3135 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, but ignoring the delete requests, and storing the data puts them out of compliance with European and American deletion and retention laws. And if they were lying, and were using user photos to train models, they have more than enough non-deleted photos already.
I’m not pulling out my jump to conclusions mat quire yet. The database corruption issue sounds more reasonable. That stuff happens, and Apple isn’t zeroing data. Most people aren’t. Because the data isn’t zeroed, a file can resurrect when a corruption issue is remedied.
I learned that things you post online can never be deleted way in school.
The difference here is that the files aren't on Apples servers, they are on your phones internal disk. It is especially dangerous with Apple as you can't even run third party software.
The difference here is that the files aren't on Apples servers
Why would you think so?
The very first thing in the article photo goes like "delete from iCloud"
The difference here is that the files aren't on Apples servers, they are on your phones internal disk.
?
This is about files that are on iCloud servers. Specifically, some photos on iCloud servers don’t get properly flagged for deletion when the user requests it. Something was getting corrupted.
Apple fixed the corruption issue, so now a handful of photo files affected by it appeared to rise from the dead. The files were always there in the cloud, but something like a corrupted DB entry was hiding them from view. Users thought they were deleted, but they were in some sort of corruption purgatory. Not visible to the user, but still taking up storage space.
Once the corruption issue was remedied, the photo app recognized the files, didn’t realize they were previously flagged for deletion, then started to sync them to the device. AKA, download them.
And yes, you can run third party software on Apple’s operating system. There are quite a few third party apps for managing iOS and MacOS’s file system.
Big complaint isn’t a lack of 3rd party apps, it’s that it’s hard to side load apps that aren’t signed.
iPhone Storage is encrypted, photos should not reappear if the encryption keys changed. Unless the keys never change, which would be very strange, especially after total reset.
Well something clearly went wrong
The bits written on mass sorage that are deleted remain there and are just marked as free storage until they get overridden by another file, this is how datarecovery works. Here, we have a similar case, where iOS hat a problem deleting the file from storage but managed to remove it from photos app index (storage is not marked as free, file could still be accessed if we had root file access but the link which pointed the photos app to the picture got removed). Now after some time, it can happen that the photo somehow gets detected (most likely as a safety measurement so that user don’t lose a picture if said link gets corrupted) and instead of deleting the file, de link gets repaired.
(Warning only a noob assumption)
Source: https://www.iphone-ticker.de/foto-panne-unter-ios-kein-fremdzugriff-aber-peinlich-fuer-apple-234979/
That's not how it should work. A wipe should do a secure wipe either by writing random data to every bit or by doing a flash erase
It isn't practical to do that on a per file basis but when the device changes ownership it is necessary
Yes, it should, but is mostly not done. But better approach is to use an encrypted filesystem like iOS and macOS(only with fileVault enabled) does. You can not recover encrypted data.
What happened here did not happen to phones that got wiped but only to phones where one logged logged off iCloud and logged into new iCloud account. Still the same encryption keys for filesystem.
There is no proof that it ever happened to a phone that was wiped completely.
Performing secure wipes reduces the lifetime of the storage device, if you sell a PC with removable storage device, it is better to just replace it with a new one for selling, and of course use fileVault on mac, bitlocker on windows and LUKS on linux (of course on linux there are more ways and LUKS is a partition and not a filesystem)
Exposes the "myth" of deleted I think is a bit much. They described it very well a good ways down:
One framework for thinking about the deletion of photos in the year 2024 is that it really has different levels. In Google’s documentation for its cloud services, for example, the company details its stages of deletion—the soft deletion, the logical deletion, the eventual expiration. The company says that in all cloud products, copies of deleted data are marked as available storage and overwritten over time. Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”
If your phone deletes a photo, say as a background process (after being in the trash for 30 days) and a bug prevents that space from eventually getting reclaimed, that data would persist even though it's "inaccessible". Fixing something else, may have made that data accessible again causing the issue people were seeing. Good to see they got it resolved though
Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”
This is how delete works on all disks and filesystems, SSD too. It just is marked as free in the fs tree. "Real" delete is called secure delete and is slow.
Rewriting bits to 1s or 0s is very slow especially in mechanical drives and is hard on equipment. Even SSDs have a rated max writes, if we rewrite all data every delete it will decrease the lifespan of hardware.
This is why is assumed they mark them to overwrite. Google knows a lot about what makes drives last longer, and OS and drive firmware makers have known for decades too.
Every so often I scrub the free space of my drives to make sure I'm not retaining exploitable garbage data. Easier to do that once every week or so than to secure delete every file.
dinosaur disk drive
Ouch
Always SDelete in Windows and scrub in Linux
Wait so these faceless corporations aren’t as invested in protecting my information as I was led to believe by their ridiculously well-funded marketing?
I mean, I clicked on “Agree” or “Yes” or whatever to that big long important screen they were so weird about.
I mean Android does a full wipe with zeros or a flash secure delete both of which will make your data extremely hard to get if not impossible.
Apple doesn't care about your privacy. They care about their image of caring about your privacy.
Anyone with a background in computing would respond, "duh." The operating system maintains a file table which contains the addresses of pieces of data on the disk. Deleting a file just removed its file table entry, and in most cases leaves the data untouched. That's why data recovery software exists, and it's also how we have the "Trash" or "Recycle Bin". If you want the photos completely erased, you'll need to overwrite the data, which wastes time and write cycles...
You're mixing up two things. In Trash, neither the pointers to the data, nor the actual data is deleted, they're just marked as deleted by moving them to a folder called Trash, or appending .trashed to their file name, which the file management part of the OS treats as trashed. If you clear your Trash, or directly delete the file permanently, the pointers are deleted so any data on the disk is marked as free to be overwritten, but until something actually overwrites it, you can recover it using data recovery software. If you change all the physical bits on the disk then the data is permanently deleted and can't be recovered. Unless, of course, it was copied to someone else's server first.
You're right, except that this is about years-old deleted pics. Like deleted-in-2021 old. The blocks on the partition have long since been overwritten.
It would be deleted if a factory reset actually did its job.
I'm not unconvinced this is a move to get people to throw away there old phones instead of creating a used market.
Factory reset is for the phone. Photo libraries are backed up to the cloud. The issue was the photos weren’t deleted in the cloud.
Do you have a source for that?
The article
It's not in the article. Unless you're referring to their speculation:
Then there’s the bizarro version of delete where you’re quite convinced you’ve gone through every single device and deleted your photos permanently, and then a restore from an old iCloud backup or a pernicious little iOS bug resurfaces those photos. Surprise! That appears to be what triggered this latest incident.
Which is not what this bug was about at all.
Yeah it's bad news reporting from Wired, but people seem to gobble it up as facts.
I wish I could write like y'all. You invent such great fantasies.
The VAST majority will never hear about this and will never be a consideration. Nobody at apple is running a secret "we won't wipe the device" team to sell more phones. That's paranoia.
You should also read the article because that would also tell you something about what is actually happening here.