I remember around 10 years ago when iCloud Photo Stream (the predecessor to today's iCloud Photos) first appeared. At that time, Apple still had a fairly decent reputation for software quality. Things have markedly deteriorated since.
Even then, something didn't sit right about uploading every photo I snap into some giant black box in the sky—encrypted or not. I never once switched this feature on. Not that I'm taking lots of NSFW pictures or anything, but, maybe there were a few.
I sleep well at night not worrying whether this bug turns out to be real. I'll back up my own photos, thanks. And I'll delete them on my own schedule.
This is the worst privacy violation and breach of trust apple users have faced. A poster described that he wiped his Ipad clean before selling it.
Now the pictures come back alive for new owner. [1]
If that turns out to be true, the question is where are the restored pictures and videos coming from?
If the device has been wiped, then it probably isn't coming from iCloud. This would still support people's claims that the files are returning to both the device and iCloud, because their device is probably just backing the files back up again when it resurfaces.
So the files are probably not actually being deleted from the device, despite the appearance that they are, and the process of wiping the device would have to leave that data behind, unencrypted, if it is going to resurface for the next user.
People with pre-17.5 iOS devices should inspect their phones storage as root before and after and try to find old deleted media, and verify the behavior. That would be the smoking gun here.
Or, for some reason, iCloud remains connected to the device post-wipe in a way that it shouldn't and somehow sends old deleted files back to the device (I find this unlikely).
Or, this singular claim of an iOS device resurfacing deleted images after a wipe is a work of clout-seeking fiction, and the problem is limited only to a failure to fully delete files.
I wonder if the photos are/were in some stuck state still in tmp space on the phone and are being picked up in a retry loop. Some people have noted the same set of photos keep showing back up are recently uploaded after re-deleting them.
A technical glitch like this sounds more likely vs. Apple purposely holding onto deleted photos for years. Still, if deleted photos are reappearing, it’s important to get to the bottom of why.
I was on 17.4 and I took screenshots of my recent pictures, then deleted a recent picture, then upgraded to 17.5. I did not see the deleted picture or any of my older deleted pictures come back.
It seems like there’s clearly a bug (based on the number of reports) just not one that affects everyone.
Just want to add a recent experience I had on this issue. I accidentally deleted a bunch of photos on my Mac (including from "recently deleted") and didn't realize it deletes it from my emtire iCloud photo library. In a state of panic, I contacted apple and they were able to restore all the photos that were "permanently deleted " from the last 60 days. This surprised me quite a bit as I was not expecting them to get them back. Makes me think if any pictures on the cloud are truly deleted.
Deleted files are kept in a hidden “expunged” folder both on device and (presumably) in the Cloud for up to 40 days pending actual deletion.
You can sometimes recover “deleted” files and media by dumping the entire phone and recovering files via the expunged folder for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photo Library — these were already deleted from the “Recently Deleted” folder.
Really makes me think that what would people that buys their "Privacy. That's iPhone" ads think when they know about this, obviously, most of them won't, though.
I had an older 32GB iPad which always showed 8G of photos with a fully empty roll (including Deleted album). Rarely has enough space for automatic updates.
Never could figure out where it went . Even backups using libmobiledevice were tiny.
I wonder what the fallout of this will be, it seems a lot worse than the maps launch that's given as the reason for Scott Forstall leaving the company.
So much for Apple’s We take privacy seriously tag line