Apple repeatedly emphasizes that this problem was rare and affected a small number of users and a small number of photos. The company did not and does not have access to a user’s photos or video.
This is still a disconcerting issue, but there is comfort to be taken in the fact that the photos in question were not stored in iCloud and could not have resurfaced on a device after it was properly erased and sold.
Oh, if they say so themselves then I trust them 100% always trust the culprit words, thank you Apple for telling the truth (it’s the truth because they said so)
Edit : apologies if this comment came off as aggressive, I did not check the community I was in ; I totally understand you guys would be less skeptical of apple than I am
I mean, maybe. But at the same time, they are the authoritative source for all things Apple. I’m sure they do downplay or exaggerate things, but that doesn’t mean they’re outright lying about everything. Then again, you could say that about any company in any sector. Be it Apple, Google, Samsung, or someone else, if you really don’t trust them, why do you use them?
That’s a never-ending death spiral of paranoia you won’t get away from. The only way to get close is to go 100% off-grid, no technology, no human contact, grow your own everything. Maybe that’s for some people, and kudos to them. But that’s not for me.
Pick your battles. Don’t sweat the petty stuff (nor pet the sweaty stuff). Also, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want the world to see if Tech Giant were to be hacked.
Also:
- search yourself online and remove yourself from all of those people search websites
- Freeze your credit accounts when you’re not actively using them
- Always set up 2FA (TOTP preferred, as SMS is weak) when available
- Use a password manager (like Keepass) and randomize all of your passwords
- Use at least 20-character long passwords when you can
- Complain loudly to websites that cap passwords at less
- Check haveibeenpwned.com for each email you use regularly
- Suppress your Lexus Nexis public data
- For US citizens, add yourself to the National Do Not Call Registry
Be proactive and not reactive.
Tl;Dr: They’re saying pretty much what we expected.
Well, it does jive with what all the tech folks expected since it follows how OSs have always deleted files by deleting only the meta data. This is how recovery programs are able to recover corrupted and deleted data. This is obviously a simplified version but you get the idea.
Apple fixes bug: wHy dOeSn’t aPpLe eLaBoRaTe wHaT ThIs bUg wAs aBoUt
Apple elaborates: WhO Is gOnNa bElIeVe aPpLe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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