An Apple Photos glitch, now fixed, is a reminder that digital bits of your life will live on forever.
  • Shrank7242@lemmy.zipEnglish
    84·
    6 months ago

    Exposes the “myth” of deleted I think is a bit much. They described it very well a good ways down:

    One framework for thinking about the deletion of photos in the year 2024 is that it really has different levels. In Google’s documentation for its cloud services, for example, the company details its stages of deletion—the soft deletion, the logical deletion, the eventual expiration. The company says that in all cloud products, copies of deleted data are marked as available storage and overwritten over time. Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”

    If your phone deletes a photo, say as a background process (after being in the trash for 30 days) and a bug prevents that space from eventually getting reclaimed, that data would persist even though it’s “inaccessible”. Fixing something else, may have made that data accessible again causing the issue people were seeing. Good to see they got it resolved though

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.deEnglish
      45·
      6 months ago

      Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”

      This is how delete works on all disks and filesystems, SSD too. It just is marked as free in the fs tree. “Real” delete is called secure delete and is slow.

      • AdamEatsAss@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20·
        6 months ago

        Rewriting bits to 1s or 0s is very slow especially in mechanical drives and is hard on equipment. Even SSDs have a rated max writes, if we rewrite all data every delete it will decrease the lifespan of hardware.

        • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          This is why is assumed they mark them to overwrite. Google knows a lot about what makes drives last longer, and OS and drive firmware makers have known for decades too.

      • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        Every so often I scrub the free space of my drives to make sure I’m not retaining exploitable garbage data. Easier to do that once every week or so than to secure delete every file.

  • poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    6 months ago

    Apple doesn’t care about your privacy. They care about their image of caring about your privacy.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    6 months ago

    Wait so these faceless corporations aren’t as invested in protecting my information as I was led to believe by their ridiculously well-funded marketing?

    I mean, I clicked on “Agree” or “Yes” or whatever to that big long important screen they were so weird about.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      I mean Android does a full wipe with zeros or a flash secure delete both of which will make your data extremely hard to get if not impossible.

  • Irdial@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    19·
    6 months ago

    Anyone with a background in computing would respond, “duh.” The operating system maintains a file table which contains the addresses of pieces of data on the disk. Deleting a file just removed its file table entry, and in most cases leaves the data untouched. That’s why data recovery software exists, and it’s also how we have the “Trash” or “Recycle Bin”. If you want the photos completely erased, you’ll need to overwrite the data, which wastes time and write cycles…

    • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
      23·
      6 months ago

      You’re mixing up two things. In Trash, neither the pointers to the data, nor the actual data is deleted, they’re just marked as deleted by moving them to a folder called Trash, or appending .trashed to their file name, which the file management part of the OS treats as trashed. If you clear your Trash, or directly delete the file permanently, the pointers are deleted so any data on the disk is marked as free to be overwritten, but until something actually overwrites it, you can recover it using data recovery software. If you change all the physical bits on the disk then the data is permanently deleted and can’t be recovered. Unless, of course, it was copied to someone else’s server first.

    • ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      6 months ago

      You’re right, except that this is about years-old deleted pics. Like deleted-in-2021 old. The blocks on the partition have long since been overwritten.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    It would be deleted if a factory reset actually did its job.

    I’m not unconvinced this is a move to get people to throw away there old phones instead of creating a used market.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      6 months ago

      Factory reset is for the phone. Photo libraries are backed up to the cloud. The issue was the photos weren’t deleted in the cloud.

          • Screemu@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            It’s not in the article. Unless you’re referring to their speculation:

            Then there’s the bizarro version of delete where you’re quite convinced you’ve gone through every single device and deleted your photos permanently, and then a restore from an old iCloud backup or a pernicious little iOS bug resurfaces those photos. Surprise! That appears to be what triggered this latest incident.

            Which is not what this bug was about at all.

            Yeah it’s bad news reporting from Wired, but people seem to gobble it up as facts.

      • desktop_userEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        why would someone not immediately disable cloud backups upon purchasing a device? are they stupid?

    • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      I wish I could write like y’all. You invent such great fantasies.

      The VAST majority will never hear about this and will never be a consideration. Nobody at apple is running a secret “we won’t wipe the device” team to sell more phones. That’s paranoia.

      You should also read the article because that would also tell you something about what is actually happening here.

      • Armok: God of Blood@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        I’ll be the first to say that Apple should burn in a fire, and that this update fiasco is something that they should pay dearly for. However, there is also a computer literacy issue here where people think that deleting files actually removes the data from the hard drive. You need specialized tools to scrub deleted data off of a hard drive, and it can take a long time, depending on the amount of space being scrubbed.

        • trollbearpig@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          6 months ago

          Man, can you people stop with this BS. One thing is if the photos where recovered from the local storage using some “forensics” to retrieve files from the free sectors in the hard drive. But that’s not what is going on here. These photos are comming back from iCloud after apple pinky sweared they had deleted them. The conclusion here is that apple is keeping your photos (and most likely all your data) in their cloud even after you explicitly tell them to delete them.

          I can’t believe people with “tech literacy” are just repeating apple’s excuse like gosspel and then lecturing other people …

    • GeneralVincent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Well this is the technology community. Kinda obvious we’re all nerds here, and care about technology 🤷 and we don’t really have to look hard lol

    • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      I only use apple for free social capital lol, you have to pick some kind of company to buy your shit from so why not the one that makes you look slightly better with zero effort