Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos

[Sippincider]

I don’t work for one of the big tech companies, but a smaller company and we don’t delete anything.

Did your company build itself on a walled garden, as the ones who genuinely cared, and was worth paying extra because they could be trusted? That a "delete" function would do just as it says?

There needs to be investigations and hearings, and fines of $10,000 per device should not be off the table.

Even if there ends up being no specific law saying delete actually has to delete, this is a major, major breach of the trust we all gave Apple.

 

[TIMO_737]

Ok. Is everyone having the issue using whatsapp etc… ? For me the pictures that re-appeared have been sent through whatsapp or were uploaded to instagram at one point…

 

[dk001]

Which law in which country?

I know in the US the collecting (cloud) company has to disclose what actually happens to data the user deletes. It is illegal for them to do something else with it. Meta got in trouble for that.

I am not sure what the EU rules around this are.

 

[dk001]

Ok. Is everyone having the issue using whatsapp etc… ? For me the pictures that re-appeared have been sent through whatsapp or were uploaded to instagram at one point…

I don’t use WhatsApp or Instagram. Anything Meta is off limits on my mobile devices.

 

[dk001]

I assume nothing is deleted.

I don’t work for one of the big tech companies, but a smaller company and we don’t delete anything. When something is “deleted” - we really just change a Deleted column in the database to true.

Depends on regulatory GDPR.
Some have to legally dispose of the data beyond a certain time frame.

 

[rschech13]

This is extremely troubling, and almost caused me some serious embarrassment today when a NSFW picture from who knows when popped up in my recents. This needs to be addressed immediately, and Apple has some real explaining to do as deleted photos are clearly not truly deleted.

 

[Reason077]

What would Apple's motivation be to actually keep photos that users have deleted?

They’re secretly assembling the world’s largest collection of dick pics. For scientific purposes, of course.

 

[AlexJaye]

So Apple is illegally keeping our photos after we delete them? For years?

So much for Apple being the King of privacy. There goes 1 more reason to ditch Apple.

Leadership needs a revamp ASAP. Bean-counter needs to go.

 

[AlexSwitch]

Which law in which country?

May be in UE with GPDR law... Al the docs, pics, movies, audio clips, originally made from myself and stored on my personal devices or on my personal cloud storage, are exclusively mine. If I want remove them from my iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud storage, Apple must cope with my request deleting effectively what I've wanted to!!

 

[bris2000]

After reading this article, I opened my Photos app to check, and can confirm it just happened to me. I updated to iOS 17.5 and macOS 14.5 this week. What happened is a "shared album" has reappeared on macOS (not iOS) says from 2020 with nearly 1,000 photos. I was watching what happened and can confirm this arrived via wifi (not from on device) as I have slow wifi, and turning off wifi paused the download and paused gain in resolution of photos that had already been partly downloaded. I deleted that album of old family photos out of my Photos app must have been years ago, I only had 88 photos in the Photos app this morning as I save them out to a folder and then delete from the app, as I have been doing for years. I do save the folder with all my photos to iCloud Drive, so maybe it is somehow copying the links across from iCloud Drive to Photos now? But anyway, they have downloaded from the cloud somewhere to my Photos app today.

 

[Siliconguy]

had to google what nsfw means. Is this phrase so mainstream its use need no introduction in a news article?

Yes.

It applies even outside of work. A student got suspended from school for posting a picture of him shooting a rifle at the range with his parents because "kid with gun."

 

[macfacts]

So many betas and no one reported this? Developers, MacRumors denizens who love to install beta releases and complain about them, and no one reported this? Please explain. MacRumors staff didn’t report this in all the beta releases they cackled about?

Apple doesn't have a public bug tracker, so how do you know no one reported any bugs.

 

[M-Life]

2 pics from 2018 showed up today . Wtf 😂

Please warn them about Covid in 2 years.

 

[macfacts]

Privacy,
You keep using that word
I don't think it means what you think it means.

 

[Jumpthesnark]

Updated to 17.5, have not seen this in my iPhone photos collection.

I did notice that the photos database did seem to take a long time to index during the iOS update.

Don't know if this is related or not, but I don't use iCloud to back up my photos.

 

[ssong]

As deeply concerning all of this is, to the people speaking of GDPR and other EU / U.K. laws, the legal requirements around deletion of data pertain to right to be forgotten requests only. Which is why the U.K. law specifically mentions it by name.

Regular day to day usage of deleting one’s data from an app doesn’t qualify under right to be forgotten and can be “soft deleted” (where the data itself is there but the reference to it is removed and the data gets marked as “deleted”).

Equally, there isn’t a legal maximum to the retention period of that data. There are specific minimums around specific types of data based on jurisdiction but there is no legal maximum, only a guidance that data should be kept for the minimum possible period that the company deems it necessary. Which basically means, as long as you can provide a reason for keeping it, you can keep it.

The only exception to this is the “right to be forgotten” which requires the business to respond within a certain period and if the request is deemed to be valid then they must action that within a certain period of time as well. This too can be done via soft deletes depending on the type of data as it only really pertains mostly to PII data but with things like user generated content I’d imagine that a hard delete would be the easiest.

TLDR - What Apple did is a deeply concerning bug, but it’s most likely not illegal as the laws people are throwing around are a lot more lenient and flexible than they imagine.

Disclaimer: not a lawyer but have worked closely on systems that have close concern with those laws.

 

[jeremz1ne]

Dang i haven't got any old photos back, would be cool if i got some of my photos back from 2015 etc

 

[HiVolt]

And that's why I don't use iCloud Photo library.

 

[tgwaste]

Yes, I’m sure Apple releasing an overpriced rainbow watch band and featuring some diversity in their ads is a big factor on why there are cracks in quality.

I feel like Apple isn’t sure whether to play it safe or be disrupters, which screws with their focus.

Doesnt help.

 

[tgwaste]

What would Apple's motivation be to actually keep photos that users have deleted?

AI Learning.

 

[OneDunya]

Since I was referenced in the article I have to say I didn't expect such a big kerfuffle over it. I had four pics from 2010 keep showing in my Photos even after I deleted them. I can now say they are permanently deleted but I wonder how they showed up in the first place? It makes me wonder when I delete a pic from all my devices is it really deleted for good?

 

[dk001]

So why are you still an Apple user if things keep getting worse and worse? Where is your red line that will make you move to Android?

So many betas and no one reported this? Developers, MacRumors denizens who love to install beta releases and complain about them, and no one reported this? Please explain. MacRumors staff didn’t report this in all the beta releases they cackled about?

An alleged, gigantic, massive, hideous bug like this supposed one surely would have been picked up and reported by any of you during the beta process, right?

No, things are not getting worse and worse, they are getting better an better with each update. Juts my opinion.

This was reported by some users. As late as B4.

I was not one as it was something I didn’t look at.

 

[dk001]

As deeply concerning all of this is, to the people speaking of GDPR and other EU / U.K. laws, the legal requirements around deletion of data pertain to right to be forgotten requests only. Which is why the U.K. law specifically mentions it by name.

Regular day to day usage of deleting one’s data from an app doesn’t qualify under right to be forgotten and can be “soft deleted” (where the data itself is there but the reference to it is removed and the data gets marked as “deleted”).

Equally, there isn’t a legal maximum to the retention period of that data. There are specific minimums around specific types of data based on jurisdiction but there is no legal maximum, only a guidance that data should be kept for the minimum possible period that the company deems it necessary. Which basically means, as long as you can provide a reason for keeping it, you can keep it.

The only exception to this is the “right to be forgotten” which requires the business to respond within a certain period and if the request is deemed to be valid then they must action that within a certain period of time as well. This too can be done via soft deletes depending on the type of data as it only really pertains mostly to PII data but with things like user generated content I’d imagine that a hard delete would be the easiest.

TLDR - What Apple did is a deeply concerning bug, but it’s most likely not illegal as the laws people are throwing around are a lot more lenient and flexible than they imagine.

Disclaimer: not a lawyer but have worked closely on systems that have close concern with those laws.

Not sure of other countries, but in the US if a company does something other than the stated intent with data they have to spell it out in the terms. Meta got in trouble for this. They were also heavily fined in the EU.

 

[AdamNC]

My god. I just looked…. I had done a major clean out of my iCloud storage. I got it down to 3800 photos. I am back up to 4150. All are from 2012-14 from what I can tell. But also a file of emails that I deleted 3-4 years ago is back. This is disturbing.

 

[dk001]

My god. I just looked…. I had done a major clean out of my iCloud storage. I got it down to 3800 photos. I am back up to 4150. All are from 2012-14 from what I can tell. But also a file of emails that I deleted 3-4 years ago is back. This is disturbing.

Emails too?