Apple fixes bug: wHy dOeSn’t aPpLe eLaBoRaTe wHaT ThIs bUg wAs aBoUt
Apple elaborates: WhO Is gOnNa bElIeVe aPpLe
Scrutinizing the big tech giants is valid, but the confirmation bias and tin foils hattery around this topic has been a little silly. In a technology community, it sure would be nice to have conversations about how the technology actually works.
I just dislike that anyone feels the need to come to the defense of a trillion dollar company.
Well it keeps people very busy, it seems. So what’s the point I am clearly missing here? It feels like we are living in that rabbit asking the bakery for a carrot cake joke.
Lemmy: Apple doesn’t care about your privacy and is secretly keeping your deleted photos because they want your data.
Reality: 1) iCloud photos are E2EE 2) Apple doesn’t have an encryption backdoor, which is why the feds keep pushing for one 3) violating deletion requests is illegal in their core markets
Aaaand… 4) your ass probably already has thousands of photos that you didn’t delete. They don’t need your deleted photos if they want to train models. They have more than enough stuff that you didn’t delete.
Small correction - iCloud Photos are only end-to-end encrypted if you enable Advanced Data Protection, which was introduced in December 2022, and otherwise Apple has the keys. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 for more details.
So the uploaded photos in question couldn’t have been e2ee. Even so, it’s reasonable for people to question the legitimacy of e2ee given instances where it’s been shown to be a lie or for the data to also have been transmitted without e2ee, like Anker’s Eufy cameras’ “e2ee” feeds clearly being accessible without keys from the user devices, or WhatsApp exposing tons of messaging metadata to Meta.
That said, I personally wasn’t using iCloud Photos prior to enabling Advanced Data Protection, and I had a few deleted photos show up from several years ago, so Apple’s explanation makes sense to me. And, like you’ve pointed out, most of the speculation was devoid of any critical thinking.
Well people had other people’s photos popping up in their own photos app. So not sure how they handle ‘encryption’. But it’s best to treat all photos uploaded to cloud as public, because that’s likely how it is. Can’t trust Google, Amazon or Apple with your data when they can and are making so much money off of it.
As its all proprietary you can’t, and basically nobody can, say anything about a backdoor. It’s pure trust in this corporation.
iCloud is proprietary by definition because Apple has not publicly released its source code under a free license.
I’d still like a deeper dive into how database corruption led to data restoration
It seems like deleting a photo must just be removing the entry from the SQLite database, and not actually deleting the photo?
Media library apps have been doing this kind of stuff forever. An index of the files + metadata allows for a better and more performant experience. But, if an entry in the DB gets pooched, file remains on the drive and is hidden from the user.
Many media library apps actually have a way to repair and or rebuild the library DB if it gets out of sync or corrupted. iTunes straight up put that feature in the menu bar. The Photos app will do it if you launch the app while holding command-option.
Back when iPods were king, how many of us had old music come back to life after a fucked up iTunes library was rebuilt? It’s kind of a similar issue.
Sure, an index makes sense for quick search, but I’m confused why deleting it wouldn’t remove it from the filesystem too
Is that why iPhones seem to have no idea how much disk space they’re using?
Given the rarity of this, it could’ve just been the normal random stuff that happens in computer land. Requests that don’t complete because they were interrupted by a crash, the rare bad block, etc. Or maybe it was just a bug that occasionally reared its head under certain circumstances.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t the first time a piece of software had an index that was messed up and out of sync with the stored files.
As for the iPhone storage thing you mentioned, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was a IOS 17 bug early on where people mentioned that the OS needed a restart to claw back space from temporary install files and caches.
That said, the corrupted DB we’re talking about appears specific to the photos app. It’s not the file system index. It’s basically a glorified preference file.
@Valmond @ozymandias117 oh so we’re still doing the baseless-accusation-without-knowing-how-it-works thing?
They keep deleted photos for a time in iCloud in case someone comes looking for them
Every cloud storage provider does it, every mail server does it, it’s incredibly commonplace
In a now-deleted post, a Reddit user last week alleged that their photos reappeared on an iPad they sold to a friend, despite them having erased the content of that iPad prior to selling it. Apple tells me that this claim was false.
I had a feeling this was the case. It makes absolute zero sense that a fully erased device on a different Apple ID could have this issue.
This is weird especially because iOS uses file based encryption, and when resetting the device the key is thrown away. So even if the files were still there, they would not be readable. I think they didn’t reset the device properly and instead deleted the apps manually is likely why this happened
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