cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12670977
iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes
I appreciate this thread’s nuanced discussion of how file deletion works from a technical standpoint depending on storage medium. But as a user, when I delete something, it should go away forever. I don’t care how.
I don’t care how
grabs your phone, throws it on the ground and blasts it with a shotgun
There you go! =)
Cloud’s deleted folder enters the chat.
Objective updated: shoot cloud server
Many years ago, we had a troubled employee leave work very mad. He was quite furious with his computer and went home for his revolver unbeknownst to us. He came back to work with it and unloaded all six rounds into the system. Each round went through the case and each one missed the drive/motherboard/videocard. So, the system was still working despite the abrupt extra cooling holes. This further incensed him and he went away even madder, but this time in cuffs.
Wow, how do you suck that bad at aiming?
It’s pretty easy if you don’t know where the computer’s vital organs are
You never shoot the
messengermonitor.
The computer is good at dodging without moving
It’s like how I can talk while holding my breath but only over a call
John Connor has entered the chat
I’ve been pleased with their messaging on that - “deleted items remaining trash for [some period]…“ (IIRC)
Well… if you really want to delete them…
takes blasted phone, insert remnants into small iron cup, places in inductive furnace
Hey at least I know it gets the job done
Easy peasy
Lemon squeezey
It’s to prevent you from accidentally deleting a photo you would never want to delete. If you want to make sure it’s deleted, you just go into the Photos app and delete it from the Recently Deleted folder. I prefer this approach, as I have accidentally deleted a photo that I did not mean to, and luckily it was still there. Use cases are different though, so.
That still doesn’t fully erase the data though. It just tells the computer that that space on the drive is available to be overwritten, but the 1s and 0s are still recoverable
Right, right. I understand that. I was just explaining why the option is good for people like me. I don’t take nudes, and I don’t receive nudes, so I don’t mind if the data is still there or not. I’m just glad the photo of me and my friend was still there when I noticed it was missing from my album after a recent meme deletion spree. lol
Imo there should be options for standard deletion and total deletion. Standard is faster, puts less wear on the drive, and keeps the files potentially recoverable, whole total would make it totally unrecoverable at the expense of taking slightly longer and putting a bit more wear on the drive
That is what thermite is for.
The second drive bay is the right size for a handy block of data erasing c4
No one will ever read my Zuck / Bezos fanfic.
Lol. I actually used to know a guy that claimed he used to have computer setup with a small thing to thermite on his hard drive and had set it up so if there were too many wrong passwords it would set the igniter off for the thermite. I don’t know if you really, did but he definitely had the technical skills to do that. He was one of those extreme early adopters of BSD and Linux who never used GUI. Oh and he was batshit crazy, legitimately I can see him thinking that was a good idea.
Nothing sinister, we just don’t delete what we say we delete. Instead we keep it in your profile to feed the algorithms and set the “deleted” flag to make you think it’s gone.
I mean, to be completely fair, that’s how data storage works.
We cannot really just make data disappear, so we let it get overwritten instead
But clearly the data is not overwritten and this was intentional. How do I know? Because that would amount to a massive amount of data, if it was de to a bug in Apple software or underlying filesystems, it would be detected in monitoring systems “Hey, we’re using 10x the data we should be, maybe we should look into it”.
The mistake was in the flag code that was supposed to fool us.
no when I say “overwritten” I mean that the area is set as deleted in the filesystem and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.
and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.
A single overwrite might not be enough to defeat physical forensics because shadows of the old data persist in how the new data is stored. Also when it comes to SSDs you might be waiting a long time for the data to get overwritten as the drive will wear-level its erm sectors (what are those things called with SSDs?).
So are you saying that they suffered from a filesystem bug that caused deletion failure? I’d imagine they use standard filesystems on their backend, I haven’t heard about any bugs like this.
If you ask me, what’s more likely, that a company known for shitty behavior lies about deleting files so they can continue to use that information to profit, – OR – that they are experiencing a filesystem bug on their backend, I’ll choose the former.
no I don’t believe a damn word of what apple’s gonna say on this, I just wanted to get the message out there that generally file deletion works by allowing data to be overwritten, so if the images are local this could very well just be that either it’s showing data that hasn’t been overwritten yet or it accidentally brought things out of the “recently deleted” depending on how long ago it was deleted.
Undeleting nudes
That’s iPhone
Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this. Any crap they pull needs to have a perfectly proper explanation, with our agreement to a specific term buried somewhere in their policies. Can only imagine how much money they blew throwing these billboards up all over the San Francisco Bay area. We have to buy Apple over Google for ostensible privacy gains, and Apple has to lock us in to their walled gardens to make up for their comparatively smaller ad/data business.
This post assumes Apple is aethical (that’s like amoral but for ethics right?) but still a self-interested economic actor. They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!
Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this.
You might be right
They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!
lol
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the shred command in Linux tries to do this, but it may not work if the hardware moves rewritten data blocks around to mitigate wear.
That’s skipping over the fact that recovering deleted data, even if it isn’t overwritten, is not an “oops”. It it takes extra effort, and if that data isn’t being protected it would be overwritten incidentally as drives are used.
There is a big difference in a database between “flagging” data and actually removing the association of the data to the database.
The data just needs to be overwritten to be truly deleted.
That’s how a lot of people handle deleted data in database, it’s literally just a flag. That’s why there’s a recommendation to edit Reddit posts before deleting them, to ensure they’re actually overwritten so they can’t just be restored.
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Yes, that’s certainly possible, but it’s also out of my control. I have basically three options:
- Delete account - we know this doesn’t delete comments
- Delete comment - “seems” to delete comments, but we’ve seen comments get restored - so probably using a “deleted” flag
- Edit comment with nonsense and when delete - should poison comment if they’re just using the deleted flag
That’s it. There’s no guarantee it works, but it has a much higher chance of working than the other two.
And there’s a good chance they delete old backups. Hosting every edit is expensive, so there’s a decent chance they clean up old data after some months.
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Funny how you think an edit doesn’t write the old record to a comments_old table
Well, there’s a non-zero chance they were too lazy to implement that.
They don’t care about your security or privacy, they care about being the exclusive vendor of your personal information.
Just the nudes. Nothing else.
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Not true, it specifically states in the article that, for example, one user had over 300 photos reappear, “some of which were revealing”. This is obviously not great but it isn’t likely as scandalous as it’s being made out to be.
The joke --------->
You ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was kinda wrote like a statement. People who didn’t read the article will read it as such, misinforming people
Have you always been a pedant or is this a recent development?
There’s so much misinformation online, sure it could have been a joke but it’s so easy to just be lazy, read the comment straight and move on acting like there’s some kind of operation going on at Apple stealing your nudes. I don’t really care if it’s a joke or not, and you’re not even the OP so who are you to say it’s for a fact a joke?
That was the case for me, until I decided to read the article
What article, it’s just a link. If I can’t read it here it ain’t there.
We shouldn’t encourage post-bot behaviour in the posters, title+summary or gtfo.
It’s scandalous regardless. The nudes just highlight the danger of this.
If you never had any nudes in the first place, and update, is there a chance to get some?
Asking for a friend.
You should check out the federated backup of Apple Cloud. You can reach it at lemmynsfw.com. I mean your friend.
Every time I go looking, there’s a barren desert of male/gay content. In some lateral communities, furry porn is beating the content ratio like 10:1.
Y’all need to hold your phones or something while you browse the 5 billion straight communities, give me something that’s not weeks+ old. Uncut guys to the front of the queue, thanks. 📸
The only problem with that server is there are tons of shit you’d rather not see. It’s sadly not as easy to filter like the reddit porn subs are.
Is it that bad? I’ve been making a habit of blocking every community that shows up that I don’t want to see. So these days I rarely see stuff I really don’t want to see.
It just gets tiresome when you have to block 100 communities for the 15 you wanna see
In that case just subscribe to the 15 you want to see then?
Kinda hard to find them if you don’t know they exist in the first place.
Check your DMs 😏
Cool
Next up, it starts showing other peoples nudes
There’s a post on reddit about some dude who gave his phone to a friend (wiped it, new iCloud, everything), and the undeleted photos are from when OP owned the phone.
With a factory reset the phones encryption keys will be destroyed and nothing should be retrievable from that device. Even if the data isn’t overwritten, without the encryption key no one could read it.
At least that’s my understanding of the modern safety- and encryption features of recent phone models/mobile OS’s.
The worst part: Apple’s iCloud is end-to-end encrypted and even Apple can’t see the users files, at least that is what they say.
If what the dude on Reddit states is true, then this is bad, really really bad! 😮
you can enable end to end encryption, it’s optional. I don’t think it’s enabled by default.
Not all of iCloud is end to end encrypted unless you manually activate their extra secure mode (which disables a few features too)
Link pls?
“I know it’s not your nude, but it’s a nude and that’s what you were looking for, right?”
Of course it’s company policy to never imply ownership in the event of a nude. It’s always the indefinite article “a” nude. Never “your” nude.
That’s a feature, not a bug
I mean that’s what is happening if the phone used to belong to someone else
Computer data is never actually “deleted” until it’s overwritten with new 1s and 0s — operating systems simply cut off references to it.
That’s not entirely correct, and I would expect a tech news site to know but ig not.
It’s true with spinny’s since they store data magnetically on the platter with 1s and 0s, but SSDs store data on the NAND as a held charge. If there’s a charge in the block it’s a 1 if there’s no charge it’s a 0.
With spinny’s, when a file gets marked as “deleted” the residual magnetic 1s and 0s will remain on the platter until eventually overwritten like they say
But with SSDs, when a file gets marked “deleted” then within no more than a few minutes TRIM comes along and ensures the charge on the NAND is released (Which means that data is gone, permanently) for that data, there’s no residuals to worry about like with spinny’s and is in fact necessary to ensure decent lifespans.
This is dependent on the TRIM schedule. It could be size based (execute a TRIM when 50% of the blocks are used).
It could be or maybe the SSD has its own on-firmware TRIM schedule, but all major OS’s execute a TRIM on a time based schedule no longer than every 10-15 minutes.
Afaik the default for windows 10 is weekly via disk defragmenter, and that assumes it recognizes the drive as an ssd. I’ve had drives cloned to ssds that retain the hdd flag and had to setup a 3rd party tool that actually saw it properly and would trim as expected.
11 might have reigned that in… but probably not.
Perhaps, but this is unrelated. The magnetic charges may still be there, but if the reference to the content is deleted, how is the filesystem meant to know what file is there? This seems really suspicious to me.
TRIM works outside the filesystem, it does not care about 99.9% of it, the only part it cares about is if there is a reference in filesystem to the block charges. No reference == data to be released
Surprise backup
Good thing I already knew Iphone wasn’t private.
I mean, they make you sign in with an Icloud ID
Never accepted the agreement, it constantly asks me to but works without it
Having said that, I am sure it still steals my photos because it’s close sourced
I dont trust that client side scanning or other system components arent going through these half deleted files
The article is being disingenuous about data not being deleted unless it’s overwritten with 1’s and 0’s. Technically that’s true, but:
Most data being deleted is equivalent to a piece of paper being placed in a trashcan, and it’s “permanently” deleted when that trash gets hauled away to a landfill (or supposedly recycling but that’s another topic). Technically it’s still forensically accessible, but it isn’t accessible by any normal means. That piece of paper may not have been incinerated, but for the majority of practical purposes, it’s gone.
Apple never hauled the trash away, even though they claimed they did. There should be no way for them to accidentally restore those photos, just like there’s no way for you to accidentally get a piece of paper back in your trash bin after it’s been sent to a landfill.
Focusing on the 1s and 0s skips past the fact they failed to complete the first, obvious, essential step. If they didn’t delete it the simple way, they would never have gotten to the 1s and 0s step. This isn’t just a simple oversight, and those pictures were still very easily accessible, just not to the people who should have been in control of them.
In your analogy, they never even put the photos in the trash can. They just put a postit on them saying “don’t show to user”. Then the updated software forgot about the postits (and started to post tits).
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I’m a paper user and I burn all my letters using a large amount of heat.
Hm… I curiously checked my phone, deleted images/videos are still deleted and haven’t resurfaced. Then again I don’t mix technology with nudity. /shrug
There are tons of reasons to take nude photos… you often have to send in nude photos for the beginning stages of surgery consultations.
And sexting is fun.
This comment comes across insanely judgemental of the individual, when the issue is that Apple deleting data and thus violating privacy.
It’s not just nudes, though. This could happen for any deleted picture. I’m not really expecting them to zero out the file system block or anything, but this implies they’re not even doing file system level deletion.
Yeah… I think I’d rather do that in person than to video record or take images of myself nude. Privacy and security is a pretty big deal to me. Hence, I don’t mix technology with nudity.
You’ve never been in a long distance relationship? And as I said, some people need to take nudes for medical reasons. It’s not a hypothetical situation, I know multiple people who have done this.
It’s fine that you have your own personal philosophy for taking nudes, but your post is coming off as judgemental of those who do.
It’s not the individual’s fault, it’s Apple’s fault for being unclear about what the delete feature is actually doing.
Hm… I never felt a need to expose myself (using tech) to another person to feel validated or to get their (or my) rocks off or for any other reason, honestly. I’m not trying be morally superior, I’m just saying I don’t expose myself with technology as a medium. In fact, I’ve never posted a photo of myself on any social media. I take privacy and security seriously.
Plus look at the consequences of exposing yourself to others through tech… blackmail, image-based abuse/exploitation, revenge p*rn etc…
My initial comment was simply stating that Apple’s latest update hasn’t undeleted any of my photos/videos in general but that then again I don’t have any nude images/videos on my iphone/iCloud storage if the claim is that nude images/videos exclusively are getting undeleted.
Ah okay. I didn’t interpret this as only nudes being undeleted, so I was reading your comment in that light. Understandable.
I just want to appreciate an argument where both user names check out, considering the stances taken by the “whore” and the “square” per the names.
🔥🔥 YES
You don’t mix technology and YOUR nudity 😉
haha…
I think mixing tech and nudity is awesome! I love getting dickpics!
I love mixing technology with nudity. But I have also avoided this problem because I don’t mix technology and Apple.
So you use a de-googled android?
Did you think some else’s nudes might have resurfaced there…?
No they’re just feeling morally superior for no good reason.
As a rule, files never get deleted… They get over written. So it depends on whether that process has happened to any loose images.
Are they not happy when they got back what they thought was lost? :-)
