4 ms·

Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

59 points by impish9208 2y ago

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Wow this is a huge breach of trust for a company that claims it has strong privacy protections. Also from a different article (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161152/apple-ios-17-photo-bug https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161152/apple-ios-17-pho...): > Another post claimed that old photos appeared on an iPad that was sold to another person. It is SO weird for Apple to fix the bug in a patch but say nothing about the fact that photos deleted years earlier reappeared for a time. They absolutely must come clean here.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  Em. The patch notes say that: > This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Right but where were they resurrected from? A database (local or otherwise) that secretly keeps deleted photos forever? And if so why is it keeping them forever instead of actually deleting them?
    - kube-system 2y ago
      Pressing 'delete' in Photos, by default, moves it to the Recently Deleted album, and uses a record in a database to schedule deletion for later.
    - Aloisius 2y ago
      I imagine the database corruption prevented the permanent delete from the Recently Deleted folder that's supposed to happen 30 days after you mark something as deleted. If it behaves anything like the Mac Photos app, then it's using hard links for things like importing photos which can lead to bugs like this if the corruption led to them losing track of one of the hard links, since you have to delete all of them to actually delete the file.
      - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
        That’s a reasonable explanation. Still, they need to be a lot more transparent about what happened and confirm explicitly that those files are deleted now and that in general, files are permanently deleted. I feel like all too often, Apple just stays silent on issues and avoids any semblance of customer support, and that needs to change.
    - dialup_sounds 2y ago
      Most likely the "secret database" is just the filesystem. Keeping things forever is the default behavior of filesystems. A photo library application is just a database pointing to files in the file system. In some cases photos were deleted from the library database without being deleted from the filesystem. That's the bug. The consequences are that: 1) the photo appears to be deleted to the user, who goes by what the application tells them 2) the photo appears to be deleted to the application, who goes by what the database says, and 3) the photo miraculously reappears when the filesystem is re-indexed by the application.
- akr4s1a 2y ago
  Heavy doubt on the sold to another person story. This sounds like a file was orphaned from its database entry and re-indexed. If you wipe your device like it was supposed to before you sell on your device, the data would be gone and it wouldn't have a remote source like iCloud to sync from either.
Tumbleweed1 2y ago
That seems like a massive invasion of privacy which I believe is illegal for them to do.
- mingus88 2y ago
  Can you explain your reasoning? If the deleted file was not shared with anyone else, how is this a “massive invasion of privacy” What law is being broken? This is a bad bug for sure but there have been far worse bugs that have actually leaked PII and endangered peoples lives. What am I missing?
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    There are reports they reappeared on sold phones as well
    - ezfe 2y ago
      There was one report and it's been deleted
    - threeseed 2y ago
      So they sold a phone with their iCloud account connected. Which means all of their current emails, photos, contacts, bookmarks, browsing history, location etc was also available.
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        I don't know, I'm just the messenger. My instinct is also to assume they didn't reset their phone, but I also assumed Apple deleted their photos when they deleted them years ago. I wouldn't be shocked to find it there's some technical cruft around it being a built in mandatory app, and corrupted data was retained. In fact, when I think about it, if I wasn't biased towards Apple, my prior after a bug involving photo deletion should be to expect bugs involving photo deletion.
    - dialup_sounds 2y ago
ado__dev 2y ago
I wouldn't assume anything "deleted" is ever truly deleted. Just a deleted_at property set and maybe the data eventually purged after many years.
- internetter 2y ago
  When I click "Permanently delete" in the Apple photos app, doing anything other than permanently deleting it is nothing short of a lie
  - Kirby64 2y ago
    You’re in for a rude awakening then with most file systems then. Delete just means “unlink the pointer to it in the file system” for the vast majority of file systems. It might get deleted when it gets overwritten… sometime in the future maybe. I assume this is exactly what happened here.
    - akr4s1a 2y ago
      Hasn't been that way in a decade. If you use nand flash there's a huge chance you're using trim which will periodically overwrite "not in use" blocks to avoid a write penalty later as writing to an empty page is much quicker.
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      However, "unlink the pointer" has been good enough for ages. The data is effectively deleted short of an application having the privileges to read the underlying raw block device and having an understanding of the raw filesystem structures to be able to search though that unallocated, raw space and reconstruct file entries. No application outside of special-purpose data recovery apps (and even then you'd need to run them with elevated privileges) would have any reason to be capable of this, so in practice a deleted file means it is deleted from the perspective of the vast majority of applications. Similarly, SSD TRIM is also irrelevant - TRIM'med space is hidden from the host. Sure, an intentional tool exploiting some undocumented vendor command or side-channel could probably recover it but again you'd have to do this intentionally.
internetter 2y ago
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.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  It is definitely legit because Apple issued a fix (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160983/apple-iphone-ipad-deleted-photo-reappear-bug-ios-17-5-1 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.
  - internetter 2y ago
    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)
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- comboy 2y ago
  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.
kibwen 2y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40370078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40370078
grugagag 2y ago
If the photo never leaves the device this seems more like a feature dedicated to law enforcement whether that is for democratic or dictatorship type of governemnt forms. There still is a speck of privacy, the device itself. If LE cannot get hold of it then it’s undiscoverable. However if any photo leaves the device without any cloud settings on we’re talking about a complete lack of privacy.
brushfoot 2y ago
Discussion on Reddit before it was removed by r/ios mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_update_has_brought_back_some_pictures/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_upd...
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Why did the mods remove it? I hate that they have such insane censorship powers on Reddit, especially when many of the top subreddits are controlled by a small group of them.
  - jimbob45 2y ago
    Reddit is a joke now. It’s all either bots or mod-curated narratives.
  - 123yawaworht456 2y ago
    because even devoted sycophants can't rationalize it away with the usual mental gymnastics.
- commoner 2y ago
  Archive before deletion: https://web.archive.org/web/20240518030444/https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_update_has_brought_back_some_pictures/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240518030444/https://old.reddi...
sys_64738 2y ago
It's impractical to delete files from long term storage. Think about a file saved to long term data storage tape. How do you delete that? It would take aeons.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Are you implying when you restore a new iPhone from a cloud backup, Apple hits its tape storage vaults?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
violiner 2y ago
Guess I'll get to see all those screenshots of my lock screen one last time.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
amusingimpala75 2y ago
iOS 17.5.1 has addressed the issue, attributing it to a database corruption issue not properly deleting it the first time

59 points by impish9208 2y ago

Wow this is a huge breach of trust for a company that claims it has strong privacy protections. Also from a different article (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161152/apple-ios-17-photo-bug https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161152/apple-ios-17-pho...): > Another post claimed that old photos appeared on an iPad that was sold to another person. It is SO weird for Apple to fix the bug in a patch but say nothing about the fact that photos deleted years earlier reappeared for a time. They absolutely must come clean here.

Aloisius 2y ago
Em. The patch notes say that: > This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Right but where were they resurrected from? A database (local or otherwise) that secretly keeps deleted photos forever? And if so why is it keeping them forever instead of actually deleting them?
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Pressing 'delete' in Photos, by default, moves it to the Recently Deleted album, and uses a record in a database to schedule deletion for later.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    I imagine the database corruption prevented the permanent delete from the Recently Deleted folder that's supposed to happen 30 days after you mark something as deleted. If it behaves anything like the Mac Photos app, then it's using hard links for things like importing photos which can lead to bugs like this if the corruption led to them losing track of one of the hard links, since you have to delete all of them to actually delete the file.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      That’s a reasonable explanation. Still, they need to be a lot more transparent about what happened and confirm explicitly that those files are deleted now and that in general, files are permanently deleted. I feel like all too often, Apple just stays silent on issues and avoids any semblance of customer support, and that needs to change.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    Most likely the "secret database" is just the filesystem. Keeping things forever is the default behavior of filesystems. A photo library application is just a database pointing to files in the file system. In some cases photos were deleted from the library database without being deleted from the filesystem. That's the bug. The consequences are that: 1) the photo appears to be deleted to the user, who goes by what the application tells them 2) the photo appears to be deleted to the application, who goes by what the database says, and 3) the photo miraculously reappears when the filesystem is re-indexed by the application.
akr4s1a 2y ago
Heavy doubt on the sold to another person story. This sounds like a file was orphaned from its database entry and re-indexed. If you wipe your device like it was supposed to before you sell on your device, the data would be gone and it wouldn't have a remote source like iCloud to sync from either.

Tumbleweed1 2y ago

That seems like a massive invasion of privacy which I believe is illegal for them to do.

mingus88 2y ago
Can you explain your reasoning? If the deleted file was not shared with anyone else, how is this a “massive invasion of privacy” What law is being broken? This is a bad bug for sure but there have been far worse bugs that have actually leaked PII and endangered peoples lives. What am I missing?
- refulgentis 2y ago
  There are reports they reappeared on sold phones as well
  - ezfe 2y ago
    There was one report and it's been deleted
  - threeseed 2y ago
    So they sold a phone with their iCloud account connected. Which means all of their current emails, photos, contacts, bookmarks, browsing history, location etc was also available.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      I don't know, I'm just the messenger. My instinct is also to assume they didn't reset their phone, but I also assumed Apple deleted their photos when they deleted them years ago. I wouldn't be shocked to find it there's some technical cruft around it being a built in mandatory app, and corrupted data was retained. In fact, when I think about it, if I wasn't biased towards Apple, my prior after a bug involving photo deletion should be to expect bugs involving photo deletion.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago

ado__dev 2y ago

I wouldn't assume anything "deleted" is ever truly deleted. Just a deleted_at property set and maybe the data eventually purged after many years.

internetter 2y ago
When I click "Permanently delete" in the Apple photos app, doing anything other than permanently deleting it is nothing short of a lie
- Kirby64 2y ago
  You’re in for a rude awakening then with most file systems then. Delete just means “unlink the pointer to it in the file system” for the vast majority of file systems. It might get deleted when it gets overwritten… sometime in the future maybe. I assume this is exactly what happened here.
  - akr4s1a 2y ago
    Hasn't been that way in a decade. If you use nand flash there's a huge chance you're using trim which will periodically overwrite "not in use" blocks to avoid a write penalty later as writing to an empty page is much quicker.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    However, "unlink the pointer" has been good enough for ages. The data is effectively deleted short of an application having the privileges to read the underlying raw block device and having an understanding of the raw filesystem structures to be able to search though that unallocated, raw space and reconstruct file entries. No application outside of special-purpose data recovery apps (and even then you'd need to run them with elevated privileges) would have any reason to be capable of this, so in practice a deleted file means it is deleted from the perspective of the vast majority of applications. Similarly, SSD TRIM is also irrelevant - TRIM'med space is hidden from the host. Sure, an intentional tool exploiting some undocumented vendor command or side-channel could probably recover it but again you'd have to do this intentionally.

internetter 2y ago

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.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
It is definitely legit because Apple issued a fix (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160983/apple-iphone-ipad-deleted-photo-reappear-bug-ios-17-5-1 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.
- internetter 2y ago
  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)
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
comboy 2y ago
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.

kibwen 2y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40370078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40370078

grugagag 2y ago

If the photo never leaves the device this seems more like a feature dedicated to law enforcement whether that is for democratic or dictatorship type of governemnt forms. There still is a speck of privacy, the device itself. If LE cannot get hold of it then it’s undiscoverable. However if any photo leaves the device without any cloud settings on we’re talking about a complete lack of privacy.

brushfoot 2y ago

Discussion on Reddit before it was removed by r/ios mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_update_has_brought_back_some_pictures/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_upd...

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Why did the mods remove it? I hate that they have such insane censorship powers on Reddit, especially when many of the top subreddits are controlled by a small group of them.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Reddit is a joke now. It’s all either bots or mod-curated narratives.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  because even devoted sycophants can't rationalize it away with the usual mental gymnastics.
commoner 2y ago
Archive before deletion: https://web.archive.org/web/20240518030444/https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1cryayx/latest_ios_update_has_brought_back_some_pictures/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240518030444/https://old.reddi...

sys_64738 2y ago

It's impractical to delete files from long term storage. Think about a file saved to long term data storage tape. How do you delete that? It would take aeons.

FireBeyond 2y ago
Are you implying when you restore a new iPhone from a cloud backup, Apple hits its tape storage vaults?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

violiner 2y ago

Guess I'll get to see all those screenshots of my lock screen one last time.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

amusingimpala75 2y ago

iOS 17.5.1 has addressed the issue, attributing it to a database corruption issue not properly deleting it the first time