Recent news on an iOS 17.5 bug that causes some deleted photos reappearing on our devices leave many doubts about how our privacy is respecteddoubts that Apple should dispel, but it surely won’t.
The iPhone has become most people’s camera. The limitations imposed by the hardware (very little space for the entire photo system when compared to what a conventional camera offers) are more than compensated by a processing system that offers results than most users would never get with a good conventional camera. You can forget about adjusting exposure, aperture, and other settings because your iPhone does it all for you. And all these photos then go to iCloud to be synced across all your devices, It locates them geographically, organizes them by face, creates reminder videos that you can watch on your TV and computer… and all without you having to do anything.. And all this with the “guarantee” that Apple offers with its encryption systems which guarantee that nothing and no one will be able to see your photos.
But what happens if photos you deleted 5 years ago suddenly appear on your iPhone? This is what happened to some users after updating to iOS 17.5 last week. Opening the Photos app, suddenly there appeared photographs of themselves that they knew they had deleted several years ago, and they also did so by occupying the positions of the most recent photos, it’s why users realized this error. You can read comments from many of these users on Reddit in a thread with over 300 comments. Although this type of information should be taken with great caution, because many users take the opportunity to have their own golden minute, the reality is that the problem exists and it has no possible explanation. For this reason, it is Apple that should offer an explanation that puts an end to speculation. But while this explanation is coming, which I highly doubt will happen, here is my own speculation, which of course does not serve to resolve all the doubts generated.
The first thing is to know what happens when you delete a file from a hard drive: it’s not really deleted. To remove it, you will have to perform a special removal process that no one does and is definitely impossible to do on the iPhone (at least for us normal users). What happens when we delete a file is that we tell the system “this space is available”, so you can use it whenever you want, but the data is still there until new data arrives to take its place, which may take some time. , or even will never happen. This is why data can be recovered from hard drives even if it is “deleted”. This is a possible explanation for suddenly, after updating to iOS 17.5, some supposedly deleted photos reappear. Maybe the update causes changes to photos that need their re-indexing and some files labeled as deleted suddenly lose that label… But this would be possible if you are using the same device on which you deleted those photos, which is unlikely. . likely if the photo in question is 5 years old or more, especially when we’re talking about the iPhone.
But what if the same thing happens at the iCloud level? What happens if the deleted files on iCloud servers aren’t actually deleted either and are still waiting for another file to take their place? Things get a little more complicated here, because one thing is that on my iPhone they get deleted but not completely, and another is that Apple has them deleted on its servers but not completely. This is a problem because it raises more than reasonable doubts about our privacy. It’s true that our photos have been encrypted in iCloud for several years, and that only someone with our iCloud account can see them even if they physically access these files. But… knowing that my deleted photos are on an undeleted server does not seem very consistent with what Apple always assures us about the confidentiality of our data.
Apple brags in its advertisements about the privacy it offers its users compared to the competition. And this is one of the reasons why I am a user of their products and services. I store my photos and documents in iCloud because it is very convenient for me, it increases my efficiency at work and also gives me peace of mind for my private life and mine. But this news cannot just pass and let time fade it away. An explanation of the failure and the solutions adopted is more than necessary.but I am very afraid that we must continue our leap of faith.
