I guess no word back from Apple on this, so we'll just forget about it and pretend it never happened...
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Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos
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Exactly. This is very concerning. that just proves that storing photos and other personal documents in the cloud is not safe. Remember when people were seeing random photos of strangers in their iPhoto library?
In my opinion, that bug is not the real issue. The main problem is that deleted photos should be permanently deleted from the servers.
Not just photos reappearing but all the shared links from iMessage are all back when I open Safari…
Technically, so long as the seller made proper use of Delete All Content & Settings prior to transfer of ownership, then all user data on the device has been encrypted and the keys shredded. If we believe Apple then this means nothing and no one can ever reassemble the data at a later time.
I don't use iCloud for photos since ever, not for docs either. I didn't upgrade to 17.5
I'm still on 17.4.1 but this s*** it's happening on my iPhone as well.
On the iPhone deleting videos or photos doesn't update the new smaller storage size, only if I restart the iPhone
On the iPad 17.4.1 it does update it even if photos and videos resurfaced as well
What a mess!
If I understand you correctly, this implies that server-side activity on the part of Apple (no OS update) is interacting with your on-device photo library even with iCloud Photos disabled?
I did the update last night. Sure enough old photos re-appeared, but not in the “Library”, but in the “Recents”. Library indicates 824 photos & videos where as the “Recents” indicates 891 photos & videos after the update. Not a problem since all photos & videos were not anything to worry about.
Not sure exactly where, but they must have activated something that triggers this mess, maybe some of the security system , under the hood automatic updates
This kind of thing is more than possible, but it ain't a dark alien interference.
Now imagine... <mist> It's 1996, and some poor schmoe, running an ad agency (me), receives emailed ad copy from a client, in MS Word... Except partway through, the copy spirals off into nonsense about quotes, estimates and purchase orders for goods and services, for businesses I never heard of...
Which was caused by MS Office Apps "quick save" routine, which suddenly didn't clear an entire cluster on disc where it wrote data (because quick), which often included sectors used by other files. Each app could distinguish its own file data, ignore the garbage; however, if you opened the file in different app, that app would reveal all the data sponged up by accident. Back in those days, MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint were VERY different apps, with VERY different file formats on Mac vs. Windows.
This was a fairly big blow-up for Microsoft, as IT news rarely ever made the popular press. IIRC, this affected only Windows Office. Little did I know at the time, that I would eventually make my next career torturing programmers who effed up like that.
Okay, children... 1996 was wayyyy back in the days of "hard discs". Data was stored on clay donuts that spun round and round on the beaks of male hummingbirds, while the female hummingbirds pecked the data into the clay. Then the clay dried "hard" from the breeze. Hard discs were slow to erase because Mud Daubers had to spackle over the data with fresh clay they mixed up in their mouths. And when the hummingbirds flew into a window, that was called a "Crash" and the data was lost because the donuts broke. And some hummingbirds killed themselves because Porsche's 996 was so meh...
The same data deletion faults can/do happen today, because why bother actively erasing data; if software obeys the rules, new data gets written where it belongs and that's that. Catch it at the wrong (right?) moment, and supposedly "deleted" data can be recovered. That's what data recovery apps/services do - cut around the controller, and read every sector directly. If you're lucky, data hasn't been overwritten. And if you're the NSA, you can recover it, even if it has been a little overwritten.
Hard discs aren't ordinarily "cleaned" until the Mud Daubers come, which is to say, an intentional sanitization cycle is performed by writing patterns of 1s and 0s across the entire drive. It's slow, but hard drives can do this all day for years without issues. On the other hand, SSD/NVRAM housekeeping does NOT perform 1/0 re-write wipes, which dramatically shorten hardware lifespan. Rather, SSDs just delete their internal crypto keys from the controllers database, leaving the data "unreadable" at rest. In high-security environments, it's prudent to force hard-drive style 1/0 wipes before SSDs or NVMEs are repurposed.
NIST Publication 800.88 Rev 1 is all about how to sanitize storage devices and media, and report same to regulatory authorities. Download a copy for bedtime. Cures insomnia.
NOW extend that potential for data recovery to GIANT multi-drive clusters that mixing SSD and Hard Discs, spanning entire data centers, on multiple continents... Yes, Amazon and Google, both of which Apple uses for compute and storage workloads (They might use something else in certain far east jurisdictions, dot-see-enn, wink, wink, say no more). SSD store hot data, while hummingbi... err... Hard Drives store glacier data. It's not much of a stretch that a few (thousand) drives units missed sanitization, then were called back into service, leaving all that data readable once again, and possibly automatically fetched, because we demand aggressive availability for our precious photos.
Why 17.5? Meh, who knows... maybe 17.5 has a new extra aggressive, thorough search-synch process, like, it went hunting. Maybe it was coincidence that 17.5 dropped on Drive-Borking-Day in Cloudland. Maybe any iOS version upgrade would have been affected, right then. Maybe in another week, it might have affected no one.
I read something today that suggested this isn’t actually a bug but rather a fix. The user said they worked with Apple a while ago when they lost all the photos they took one day after their phone froze up.
The user asserted that Apple suggested that the photos weren’t fully deleted, rather, they’d been “hidden from the photo library”.
The user suggested that a fix for this was placed in 17.5 to “unhide” any file in iOS that had been orphaned by a failed deletion in any version of a previous iOS install on any previous iOS device since 2008. If the hidden data was in the backups used to setup / restore the current device.
Ofc… it would then not be surprising if Apple doesn’t comment on this, because they’d essentially have to admit that their delete function hasn’t always worked properly for the last 16 years.
The user asserted that Apple suggested that the photos weren’t fully deleted, rather, they’d been “hidden from the photo library”.
The user suggested that a fix for this was placed in 17.5 to “unhide” any file in iOS that had been orphaned by a failed deletion in any version of a previous iOS install on any previous iOS device since 2008. If the hidden data was in the backups used to setup / restore the current device.
Ofc… it would then not be surprising if Apple doesn’t comment on this, because they’d essentially have to admit that their delete function hasn’t always worked properly for the last 16 years.
Is this bug only related to the cloud ? I thought it could also be photos you only store on your device that were also deleted ?
Now that’s a bit concerning. It leads to the next question - if true - what else aren’t you telling us?
Can’t be just cloud (I don’t use ICloud Photo) and so far have traced my returning pics to three devices none of which I currently own. I have also had a couple of “Setup as new” mixed in there due to bad beta loads.
It needs to be stated again that @katbel is reportedly experiencing this same phenomenon without iCloud Photos and without updating to 17.5. If this is an accurate assessment then it implies something server-side is happening with Apple and that it is interacting with local on-device photo libraries allegedly not linked to iCloud. If that doesn't sound concerning then read it again repeatedly until it does. @katbel do you use iCloud Backup?
i have had several albums appear of photos that had been taken by apps, and never saved to my actual camera roll.
i had used the camera function in an app called seek to identify some plants near my house, and now there is an album called seek that has these photos in it.
i had also been using the camera to scan receipts into my airmiles app, and these now appear in an album called verify.
so at least in my case what is appearing is photos taken by the camera function within apps, and which where never explictly saved.
looks like a sandboxing failure of some kind.
i had used the camera function in an app called seek to identify some plants near my house, and now there is an album called seek that has these photos in it.
i had also been using the camera to scan receipts into my airmiles app, and these now appear in an album called verify.
so at least in my case what is appearing is photos taken by the camera function within apps, and which where never explictly saved.
looks like a sandboxing failure of some kind.
If this is related or not, I don't know, however Forbes wrote this about a week ago: "Apple hackers have managed to gain admin access to an Apple platform, for the third time, with a remote code execution exploit that included resetting an admin password."
So Apple have been hacked at least 3 times recently, probably more because not all hacks are immediately found.
So Apple have been hacked at least 3 times recently, probably more because not all hacks are immediately found.
One can't help wondering if those users who are being affected by recent password reset shenanigans have in fact been targeted and are now compromised. Obviously wild speculation on my part but at this stage I discount no possibilities.
Apple haven't responded to feedbacks for a few years now, except in very specific cases. I don't file them any more - it's a waste of time.
Bugs such as this one, and the one where Apple IDs get locked out (and the password reset options messed up) are also not acknowledged any more. Third party apps, especially those which avoid the use of iCloud for syncing, tend to be more reliable nowadays.
If this continues, it won't be long before Android becomes more stable and secure than iOS, at which time people will start to switch. We may need to wait for this to happen before Apple realises that their poor quality actually affects sales, and does something about it. Sometimes one needs to hit rock bottom to understand the problem.
