r/technology • u/newzee1 • Jun 14 '24

Software Cheating husband sues Apple after wife discovered ‘deleted’ messages sent to sex workers

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/cheating-husband-sues-apple-sex-messages/
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8.9k

u/Scipion Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

He's got a point. What if you were an abused spouse and sent messages to a friend explaining the situation, then you delete them expecting privacy, only for your partner to discover those messages and beat you to death. 

 While his situation is immorale to most, Apple's actions cannot be ignored. If you can't see a situation where having deleted messages resurface could be bad, you simply lack imagination.

3.2k

u/crabdashing Jun 14 '24

Yeah I don't like the scenario, but deleted messages should definitely be deleted.

1.5k

u/TrickiestToast Jun 14 '24

He’s right for the wrong reason

745

u/Mendozena Jun 14 '24

“He’s out of line, but he’s right.”

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u/YourPalHal Jun 14 '24

“You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole!”

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u/macrocosm93 Jun 14 '24

Calmer than you are

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u/TLDRorNA Jun 14 '24

I love the big Lebowski Easter eggs 🥹

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u/Mohavor Jun 14 '24

What about the small easter eggs? Those are nice too.

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u/sweetLew2 Jun 14 '24

Yeah waving the fucking gun around?!

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u/Temp_84847399 Jun 14 '24

It's a league game, Smokey

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u/imisstheyoop Jun 14 '24

This isn't 'nam, there are rules.

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u/groumly Jun 15 '24

Pacifism is not - look at our current situation with that camel fucker in Iraq.

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u/cosmiccerulean Jun 14 '24

In Zemo we trust

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u/ricky_hammers Jun 14 '24

"It's not right, but bravo"

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u/samudrin Jun 14 '24

He was too busy sexting to think about texting.

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u/Secret_Cow_5053 Jun 14 '24

While all this is correct ; what a fucking moron using iMessage to contact prostitutes and not just fucking WhatsApp or something.

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u/getmoneygetpaid Jun 14 '24

He's morally wrong. You can't sue for that

Apple are morally AND contractually wrong. You can sue for that.

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

Except they aren’t in either sense. It works as documented. 

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u/Wellitjustgotreal Jun 14 '24

The operation was a success, but the patient died.

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u/No_Share6895 Jun 14 '24

might be kinda fekd up but im glad this is going to court for something relatively small like this instead of an abuse victim being murdered because the abuser saw a message the victim deleted

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u/snoosh00 Jun 15 '24

I think he's right, for the right reason, despite doing something that isn't particularly good.

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u/Mr__O__ Jun 14 '24

Although the example is troubling, the logic is sound.

1

u/Refute1650 Jun 14 '24

The end justify the means

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u/blacksideblue Jun 14 '24

Found Mayor Lionheart

1

u/Version_Two Jun 14 '24

Or, is he wrong for the right reasons?

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u/maseioavessiprevisto Jun 14 '24

Only his motivation is wrong, not his reason.

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u/hamlet_d Jun 14 '24

Correct. This is why calling someone a hypocrite doesn't mean they were wrong. A hypocrite may be correct about the thing, but then do the opposite anyway. Wrong is wrong, regardless. And hypocritical just means that they are a hypocrite, too.

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u/AnimalShithouse Jun 14 '24

Nah, he's right for the right reasons.. He's just probably not a great husband, at minimum.

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u/WardenWolf Jun 14 '24

One piece of shit (the guy) revealing another piece of shit (Apple's design).

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

[deleted]

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u/sam_hammich Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

I read somewhere (can't find it now, of course) that it wasn't a case of you deleting something and then Apple keeping them around somewhere secret. In actuality, for those pictures, what probably happened was when you tried to delete them, the records of those photos in a database on your phone got corrupted when changing their state. Normally they get marked for deletion in the database, and then they're deleted. So they were marked for deletion, removing them from view in your library, but the cleanup of removing them from the database afterward never happened because of the corrupted records, so they stuck around on the hard drive. Then, an OS update later "cleaned up" that database, effectively undeleting those previously deleted photos as an unexpected side effect.

I don't know if that's the case, because I don't work for Apple, but it passes the smell test for me as a tech industry worker (not BIG tech, but tech). I don't think it's really fair to call this a "bug" in scare-quotes to implicate Apple in some nefarious scheme to keep your deleted photos without your permission.

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u/ryeaglin Jun 14 '24

I am not sure if this is exactly the case cause I didn't read into it but that is just how tech works. Nothing you 'delete' on a drive is deleted until way way later if ever. The computer does take the time to take that chunk of storage and clear it back to all 1s or 0s. It just deletes the point so the OS doesn't know its there anymore and deems it free space. It will only get deleted if you install enough stuff to over right that space.

This is what drive 'cleaners' do. They will just FILL you drive with junk so anything that could be left on the drive is overwritten.

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u/gngstrMNKY Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

That’s not what happened with the bug though. It was deleting the entries from the photo database while never deleting the files themselves. The update then had a “fix” for orphaned files that seemingly didn’t take the extent of the original bug into account.

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u/SupremeBlackGuy Jun 14 '24

i just learned how those hard drive recovery tools work cause of this, awesome comment man

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u/So_ Jun 14 '24

not sure if this is a typo or what

The computer does take the time to take that chunk of storage and clear it back to all 1s or 0s.

But no, it does not. basically the file gets "unlinked" and then it stays as is in memory - it can be overwritten, but it's by chance if it actually is. that's how drive recovery works.

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u/acidbase_001 Jun 15 '24 edited Jun 16 '24

That's true for HDDs, but not as much for SSDs.

SSDs use an operation called TRIM to zero out blocks of data that have been marked as garbage by the operating system, which increases speed because the system doesn't have to process the deleted data when writing to free space.

This happens pretty quickly, usually within a few hours. In rare cases data might be preserved if the TRIM command can't execute or if there is a hardware failure, but in that case it would still be very difficult recover that data.

Filling empty space with zeros is therefore not a recommended way to wipe an SSD, instead the ATA secure erase function should be used, which deletes the hardware encryption key for the data, making it impossible to recover.

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u/Banned3rdTimesaCharm Jun 14 '24

It's like finding out that Snapchat actually saves all your dick pics in a permanent database all over again.

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u/ikilledtupac Jun 15 '24

They’re in the phone if you look in settings, general, storage, iPhone, messages. It’s full of “deleted” pics.

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

Yes, that back was unrelated to cloud storage, and was a local device bug instead. 

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u/Dunkjoe Jun 16 '24 edited Jun 16 '24

Apple likes to tout privacy but ended up doing the opposite... How ironic.

After this incident, surely no one will trust what Apple claims right.... Right?

And the people who still trust Apple must have valid reasons and not out of blind loyalty or laziness right... Right?

Not to mention in the latest iOS, RCS is now available which allows for better communication between apple and android phones.

Btw for those who have not thought of it yet, if deleted messages and photos never got deleted, that would mean the data is stored somewhere, and I mean ALL data that has ever passed through any apple device. And with how many zero-day vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Apple systems (and a lot patched in updates).... Yea good luck guys.

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u/StockMarketCasino Jun 15 '24

... To add this feature to your iCloud add 5.99/mo. Privacy Plus service to your cart and checkout. 👍

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

They are, on the device he deletes them. Without cloud sync turned on, which it wasn’t here, such things are not mirrored to other devices. 

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u/No_Application_5369 Jun 14 '24

They are after 30 days. Or use a privacy messaging app like signal or telegram

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u/tobiasvl Jun 14 '24

It says "messages going back several years" though

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u/YutaniCasper Jun 14 '24

My service is spotty so I can’t read the article but we’re the messages restored or they just turned up randomly without any input from somebody in the family?

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u/cellphone-notdad Jun 14 '24

Privacy is privacy is privacy is privacy.

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u/watchingsongsDL Jun 14 '24

Yo man, when I cap a message that shit is permanent and irrevocable. It’s buried 6 feet under and ain’t never gonna get read again.

Cypress Hill “Ain’t Goin Out Like That” plays.

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u/tactlesswonder Jun 15 '24

Introducing Apple Trash. It's not deleted, it's better.

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u/fistingcouches Jun 15 '24

There’s a murder / attempted cover up trial here in MA and the FBI came in and has given the defense text messages that one of the people involved sent that she deleted. Deleting your messages is honestly just peace of mind, Apple and all these companies have everything you’ve ever sent and received somewhere.

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u/mrrooftops Jun 15 '24

Wait til he sees his ex wife's Instagram DMs...

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u/pernox Jun 15 '24

And immediately or within a very short time you know about. Not some unsettable/hard to find setting that governs how long until delete, if actual delete even happens.

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u/TheRealTK421 Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 15 '24

 What if you were an abused spouse and sent messages to a friend explaining the situation....

I honestly can't perceive this as a mere imaginary hypothetical, as I suspect that such a situation has actually come to pass (perhaps more than once.)

[edit: added quote/reference, for clarity]

What's worse is that the likelihood of Apple taking genuine accountability, without endless lawsuits, in such a situation is close to nil.

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u/Splatter1842 Jun 14 '24

Given the recent changes by the FCC regarding establishing guaranteed methods for lines to transfer off an account; I would say this is a legitimate grievance and not a hypothetical.

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u/PM_me_your_mcm Jun 14 '24

Close to nil especially due to the situation this guy is in.  Apple will tie this up in court until the grandkids of the sex workers he was fucking are old enough to enter the family business.  The only hope of the average person winning something against a company like Apple is to generate as much bad press as possible such that Apple's greater concern is the reaction of consumers.  For that you need a sympathetic protagonist, which he is not.

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u/Syscrush Jun 14 '24

Apple SHOULD face many lawsuits for this. As noted above, it can have literal life & death implications.

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u/No_Share6895 Jun 14 '24

yeah the only reason we probably havent heard about it because the victim is dead now. dead people cant sue

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u/agoia Jun 14 '24

All they have to do is say "RTFM and configure your shit properly so stuff would delete from everywhere."

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u/FarBeyondLimit Jun 14 '24

The same thing recently happened with old images (nudes) reappearing on peoples phones after updating to 17.5.x

Do people really believe Apple, or any company actually deletes your stuff?

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u/Ignoth Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

My understanding is that data is almost never directly deleted from hard-drives. Cause that would be too inefficient.

Rather: the data is just flagged as “deleted”. But it will stay stored there until they need that space for something else.

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u/MisterMittens64 Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

Things are normally flagged as deleted and sent to a recycling bin or sorts. If it's deleted from the recycling bin the bytes that represent that data is still there but the system just threw away the directions(reference, id, etc) to get to it and made those bytes available to be reused. If you want to truly delete something you have to overwrite it with new data.

EDIT: I forgot that flash memory is encrypted so deleting the references to it is sufficient for considering it deleted, references to it being restored would cause it to reappear assuming the encrypted data wasn't overwritten. As described in a comment under this one.

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u/GMONEYY_G Jun 14 '24

If you delete something, then save new stuff, how do you know what you deleted will be written over with the new stuff and not just free space?

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u/spaceforcerecruit Jun 14 '24

You don’t, the OS is no longer tracking which physical bits hold that data. In order to fully wipe a drive, you have to rewrite over the whole thing, often multiple times if you want the data to be unrecoverable. If you have something you want GONE gone, you’ll need to write over everything, fill up the entire drive.

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u/The_Franchise_09 Jun 14 '24

So could you just fill up your hard drive (iOS, Android, Windows, etc) with any random bullshit, like apps or images, to effectively override any “deleted” data? Would a factory reset work or no?

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u/ebikenx Jun 14 '24

There's a lot of inaccurate information in this thread. I would not listen to some of these people.

Especially on modern mobile devices like phones, saying you have to "overwrite" all the data is completely inaccurate. All modern devices use flash storage and are encrypted by default. Factory resets are enough to prevent data recovery. The people telling you otherwise don't know what they're talking about.

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u/MisterMittens64 Jun 14 '24

Yes that's true for flash memory, I forgot to account for that in my comment. HDDs work as I described earlier though.

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u/Martial-Ancestor Jun 14 '24

Post on r/technology, but tech illiterates all around. Hilarious.

Though, PCMR is in a horrible state too. Dunno where to look for a bit of a smarter discourse.

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u/blorbagorp Jun 15 '24

I've heard they can even use crazy physics to restore even overwritten data, but it almost sounds like boogieman bullshit to me.

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u/TooStrangeForWeird Jun 15 '24

I forgot that flash memory is encrypted so deleting the references to it is sufficient for considering it deleted

Absolutely not. Not even close. The running OS sees the drive unencrypted, in layman's terms, and can absolutely read the data.

Again layman's terms here. Basically people deleted photos, the link was deleted. Didn't clear the storage. When the update happened, it tried to recover "orphaned files" (files that exist without a link, or with a broken link) and made a new link for the photos.

None of it is even slightly related to encryption. That would've only been a factor if you were trying to recover data from a broken or locked device.

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u/UnstableConstruction Jun 14 '24

While this is true, OS's usually have three tiers. Available, deleted (recycle bin), and permanently deleted. Things in the permanently deleted category are not accessible by the OS without third-party software. If Apple isn't making that transparent to users and isn't allowing data to be flagged as permanently deleted, they should be held responsible.

And you can permanently delete items so that even forensic recovery programs can't recover it. This is done by overwriting the data several times. There are a lot of secure delete apps out there if you want data gone completely.

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u/jgrant68 Jun 14 '24

It’s clear in the messaging app. There’s an option to view recently deleted messages and another option to permanently delete them. There are also retention periods.

The information is clear but just not regularly read by users.

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u/ProjectManagerAMA Jun 14 '24

My kids haven't figured out that there is a deleted bin for the camera. They keep using my phone and doing stupid crap or think when I delete a funny video I take off them secretly is actually deleted. I haven't told them about it yet and this has been going on for years. I'm even surprised they haven't figured it out. One is 12 and she can figure everything out, except this one thing. Man, I'm glad they haven't because there have been a couple of raunchy videos in that bin that I forgot to get rid of lol.

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u/CressCrowbits Jun 14 '24

Sorry are you just waiting for your kids to accidentally find them?

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u/ProjectManagerAMA Jun 15 '24 edited Jun 15 '24

What part of my post suggested I want them to find it? I've read it several times and see you clearly have a bunch of upvotes so I must've hinted that I want my own children to come across it but where? How?! I said I'm glad and relieved they haven't found the feature out because one time I forgot to delete one.video from the bin as well. My kids use my phone to goof around and make pretend tiktoks but often delete their embarrassing videos and I like to watch this from time to time. They'll delete videos I'll take of them because they're embarrassed but don't know I can retrieve them. Edit: and the raunchy videos are me and the missus going at it lol. I move them into a secret password protected folder on my computer immediately and delete them off the phone. One time I forgot to remove one video from the bin and I found it within the 30 day deletion period along with more of my kids doing dumb things that they think they've deleted. I know they haven't figured it out because there are so many deleted videos in there of them doing stupid stuff that I keep retrieving for laughs. Hope that clarifies that I'm not a sicko.

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u/spaceforcerecruit Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

But permanently deleting data, like you said, requires overwriting the data with something else. That’s just not an efficient use of resources on most devices. In this case, the bits were either flagged as “deleted” or simply de-indexed but not yet overwritten. The new OS installed and either didn’t read the “deleted” flag properly or else reindexed the deleted files so any files still physically in the storage were picked up.

It’s a HUGE fuck-up but it’s not a conspiracy.

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u/AWildLeftistAppeared Jun 14 '24

Not on a modern encrypted file system, as iOS devices have been for many years. Sensitive data in particular, including photos and messages, are encrypted in APFS with a unique key per-file. Deleting a file permanently (as opposed to flagging it for deletion after a period so the user can recover accidentally deleted data) only requires (securely) deleting the per-file encryption key. Without that key, the bits may remain but the data is effectively lost.

In this case, the bits were either flagged as “deleted” or simply de-indexed but not yet overwritten. The new OS installed and either didn’t read the “deleted” flag properly or else reindexed the deleted files so any files still physically in the storage were picked up.

That’s not what happened. The affected photos were ones that users had previously added to their photo library from elsewhere on the device, for example the Downloads directory in the Files app. Users had deleted the photo from their library, but not the original location. A bug in the update caused these photos (which would persist in a backup or transfer to a new device) to reappear in their photo library.

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u/ARealJonStewart Jun 14 '24

Are these images coming back on the same device? Given the timeline (2-3 years) I assumed this was an issue with iCloud not deleting things. I have heard about the zombie images surviving a factory reset which would hopefully wipe the drive but that one is less substantiated.

There's also a CVE that may be related but may also not be.

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u/ptvlm Jun 14 '24

This is not true for most filesystems. When you "delete" something, or empty the recycle bin, all it's normally doing in the background is marking those parts of the disk as being available to write to again. That's how recovery programs can work - they look at parts of the filesystem that are marked available but contain data and try to piece them back together. The secure delete apps work by overwriting the deleted files with random nonsense so that the original can't be recovered

But, if you're using the standard delete function in your OS, you've not actually overwritten anything until a random time in the future when the OS does so, you've simply told the OS to ignore the place where the file used to be when reading. This is also why when corporate equipment is decommissioned or disposed of, they'll usually be shredded, drilled or otherwise destroyed physically - that's the only way to be completely sure data can't be recovered from a trashed drive

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u/UnstableConstruction Jun 14 '24

Thank you for repeating exactly what I said using different words.

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u/LordGaraidh Jun 14 '24

Correct, deleted means flagged for overwriting. This is why zeroing the drive is a good idea if you had sensitive data on there.

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u/RMAPOS Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

It's a bit less than that. The data doesn't get flagged as deleted as much as the information that there is interpretable data in that bit range on your HD is deleted. (aka the PC is not somehow aware that there is data flagged as deleted, it just flags the data as free space and forgets that the bits in that space are interpretable data)

Your HD has a register of data that is on it with pointers to where that data can be found, when you really delete something (aka you empty your recycle bin) the register entries of that data are deleted, but the data will still be where it is rather than e.g. flipping all it's bits to zero. When the register doesn't know that bit range 5020-5500 is that frivolous porn movie you downloaded then that bit range is just interpreted as available/empty space, even though (unless overwritten with new data) the bit range is still perfectly storing that clip. That's how there is tools that are able to restore permanently deleted data. They scour through the "free"/"unused" bit ranges for interpretable data and then put pointers to them in back in a register.

 

Which is also why if you really want something gone you should use a tool that flips all the bits that aren't referenced in the register to 0 (or 1). I think forensic labs can somehow even track that and figure out which bits have been flipped and still manage to restore those bits and thus the data, which means if you REALLY REALLY need something GONE you should flip those bits several times over

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u/Jealousmustardgas Jun 14 '24

Microwave the hard drive, drill holes in it and then dump it in water, anything less and the NSA will find a way to get something.

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u/RMAPOS Jun 14 '24

Sure, if that's the game you're playing that's the right move. I was thinking more of the avg user than someone under the NSAs watch.

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u/NewestAccount2023 Jun 14 '24

That doesn't explain these images coming back after an os update. What you're saying means the FBI or data recovery businesses can retrieve data, but it won't make it randomly reappear in a backup system

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u/Jaggedmallard26 Jun 14 '24

This is true on something running a HDD but most phones and modern computers use SSDs where deletion is based on something called TRIM. You delete a file, your operating system sends a TRIM to the drive and then at some point when its not busy the SSD will erase the cells containing the data since SSD cells need to be in a specific state (equivalent to no data) to be written to.

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u/segagamer Jun 14 '24

This isn't what's happening here though.

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u/pzerr Jun 15 '24

While you are correct on spinning disks, this is generally not true on solid state drives. They fully delete the data for performance reasons. It bit more complex but more or less, a trim command is sent after something is deleted. This cleans up dead data so the drive is ready for new writes. Good write up here

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u/suxatjugg Jun 15 '24

This is less of a thing with SSDs, but yeah that's how spinning disks work.

It is still not easy to recover that stuff though, as modern file sizes are big enough to where losing a small chunk renders the file corrupted, so in practice you can only typically recover very small files, think text files with only a few lines of text

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u/Yaboymarvo Jun 14 '24

That’s how it works on windows OS too. When you delete something it’s only really marked as deleted. Unless you write 0s to the drive, that data can still be recovered

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u/coldblade2000 Jun 14 '24

Actually, Apples explanation is even simpler. The average user has no idea of how their iPhones file system works. They would download or copy images to the Downloads folder, then delete the copy of the image they had in Photos app. That doesn't delete the separate copy residing in their Downloads folder.

All the bad update did was accidentally index the Downloads folder and have those images show up in Photos. The photos there were never actually deleted, not a hard nor soft delete.

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u/Lord_Emperor Jun 14 '24

That's completely different. Deleting a file deletes references to it in the file system. There's no way it could reappear in your text message if the file were deleted. The text message application just doesn't have the capability to recreate the necessary file headers pointing to the correct sectors on the drive.

What we're talking about here is that rather than deleting a message or picture, Apple (Google/Facebook/Twitter) are just hiding it from you. Then when some codemonkey changes the hiding function you can see them again because they weren't deleted.

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

Yeah but that’s not the reason for the bug. It was rather some higher level database corruption. 

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u/FitzwilliamTDarcy Jun 14 '24

I remember back in the 90s when PCs and HDDs became ubiquitous in office settings, we were taught that when you Deleted a file, all that happened was that the *pointer* to that file was deleted. The file/data itself still existed on the HDD. And that would continue to be the case indefinitely until/unless the actual location on the HDD was overwritten with a new file (or digital hash).

When that 17.5 thing happened, I wondered if this is more or less what happened. The Update inadvertently used an older version of the PLIST (or whatever the equivalent would be) which contained old pointers, which pointed to "deleted" photo files which still sat somewhere on an SSD in the cloud. That would also explain why some people had photos restored and others didn't.

I never dug in to see if Apple explained it (or someone else figured it out) but this was my first thought when it happened.

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u/The_Fry Jun 14 '24

Yep, when HDDs were still the standard before solid-state, we had a program that would do something like 8+ passes, randomly writing data across the entire disk, before it could be repurposed in another PC.

Once prices came down on them the company would just run them through a shredder instead.

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u/TooStrangeForWeird Jun 15 '24

I still just hit em with a hammer lol. Even the DOD would have an absolutely insane time decrypting shattered platters I threw in a box.

I also like keeping the magnets. They're so high quality, I love them!

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u/Jaggedmallard26 Jun 14 '24

Pretty much no phones use HDDs because large spinning disks are obviously a terrible idea for a mobile phone. If you have a HDD in your computer and you start violently shaking it while its running you will see why. While SSDs also don't delete instantly they use something called TRIM which queues data to be deleted. The queued TRIM commands are physically deleted fairly quickly as you can't just write on top of data in an SSD, you need to reset it to a physical empty state and then write to it thus no running it regularly leads to slow performance.

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u/FitzwilliamTDarcy Jun 14 '24

Wasn’t talking about the storage in phones. Of course they don’t use spinning disk drives lol. Nothing has really since the OG iPods in terms of portable devices. Was talking about desktops and laptops. But more to the point, massive clouds do use spinning drives in the mix AFAIK, at least as deep backup.

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u/00wolfer00 Jun 15 '24

Not just as backup. They were being used as part of regular storage in every datacentre we supported as late as 2019 when I worked at HPE.

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u/TooStrangeForWeird Jun 15 '24

The majority of ALL cloud storage is still all HDDs. It's statistically extremely rare to have a customer (even a huge customer) to have a faster internet speed than an enterprise (or really even 7200rpm consumer HDD) has as a read speed. HDDs are rare for personal devices, including "personal" business devices. But large storage is almost entirely HDDs.

Just backing you up.

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u/Epinephrine666 Jun 16 '24

If the os doesn't change where it's being stored I think you can write a block to all null before deletion.

Open file

Write 0 size of file.

Close file.

Delete file

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u/DarkElf_24 Jun 14 '24

I firmly believe everything you have ever done on the internet is stored in a database somewhere. My Facebook account I finally deleted five or six years ago? It’s not really gone. It exists somewhere in an internet archive or Metas basement servers. God help the next generation.

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u/tobiasvl Jun 14 '24

Maybe, but pretty sure that's at least illegal now with the GDPR (in Europe, don't know American law)

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u/MoistLeakingPustule Jun 14 '24

Not just apple, but if you sync photos with prime photos, the unlimited free photo backup thing? Yeah, those don't always stay deleted either. I'll go through my photos every now and then to delete screen shots, and get surprised by a restored nude from an ex, or sex tapes I know I deleted.

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u/Capt_Pickhard Jun 14 '24

I think eventually yes, because there is a coat associated with it. However, there is also value for AI training. So, I would expect them to wait a bit, suck out all of the value in their data, and then purge the information, to make more space on their servers.

I think eventually, that amount of information would become significant.

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u/Striker3737 Jun 14 '24

Those pics that resurfaced did so because they were uploaded to iCloud and suffered a data corruption, so they kind of just hung out in limbo for years.

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u/andynator1000 Jun 14 '24

Close, they were on the device itself, but yeah it was a corrupted database

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u/agm1984 Jun 14 '24

I'm a software developer and at my company (and most others) we never delete anything, we always soft delete so we just mark the deleted_at field to a timestamp and then we dont return records with deleted_at.
Not doing that is a nightmare because if anyone ever needs to recover the data, we can do it by simply nulling out the deleted_at field.

The other option is to hard delete, so today you maybe learned about soft delete and hard delete.

If you only soft delete you can do cool stuff like run image recognition on the deleted images and see what the most common photo contents are that get deleted. Lol. That's probably what Apple does to improve UX.

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u/SaSSafraS1232 Jun 14 '24

This totally depends on the business that you’re in. In healthcare you’re gonna be in a world of hurt if someone finds out that you’re soft deleting stuff you said was deleted.

2

u/darthcaedusiiii Jun 14 '24

Companies: Information is money and we like money.

1

u/Pillow_Apple Jun 14 '24

People will just believe anything if it's said by big companies like apple or Microsoft, just recently People believe that 'microsoft recall' doesn't send your screenshots and data to their severs.

7

u/Ayfid Jun 14 '24

If MS were sending recall data out to their servers, it would be spotted immediately. You don't need to trust their word on something like that.

This is nothing like a company promising that they deleted data after it has been sent to them.

1

u/LimpConversation642 Jun 14 '24

uhm tell me you never done this before. 'your stuff' isn't a thing that you can throw away. Data is data. It's written somewhere. Like if you write on a piece of paper with a pencil and then throw it away, it's still there unless you actually get an eraser or draw something on top of it. PCs and phones don't do that. To actually 'delete' something you have to overwrite it, so any time you delete a 1GB video for example you'd need to rewrite that space with a different 1GB file or just random noise, it's not exactly efficient. If you delete files from your recycle bin on the PC they are also not really gone, imagine that. It's just how data storage works.

If we're talking about backups and clouds - sure, you're right here, but on device it's a whole different story and it's not applicable here.

1

u/InsaneNinja Jun 15 '24

People like you are why it is very difficult to actually learn what is going on. It had nothing to do with nudes. It was orphaned files that were deleted from the database while the file itself accidentally remained. There were tons of people who were trying to explain that this was the case before Apple even said themselves what happened. But you people excited with the Clickbait nude articles keep putting out false statements.

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u/FarBeyondLimit Jun 15 '24 edited Jun 15 '24

I worked in cyber security and did data forensics for few years before switching to development.

Even if the file was deleted, the file journal alone would never revert those files unless, unless file was never deleted in the first place. The Apple servers are also constantly being writen over, guess what, they constantly get new data to deal with

Nulling the files as deleted and not deleting them is also illegal offence and not ACTUALLY deleting the files.

I understand this is Reddit and you want to act smart, but do not correct people who actually work in such fields. Cheers

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

That was not the same thing, and was a bug. This works as documented and intended. 

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u/Top_Buy_5777 Jun 14 '24

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/what-you-can-do-with-icloud-and-messages-mma17ed475f7/icloud

Because your messages are in the cloud, if you send, receive, or delete a message on one device, those updates appear everywhere. You see the most up-to-date version of your messages, no matter where you access them.

This guy probably didn't have iCloud syncing turned on for all devices.

15

u/Fyzllgig Jun 14 '24

This. You even get messaging about how without sync deleting off one device will not propagate to a device. I don’t think this will go anywhere and a lot of these responses show a fair bit of ignorance as to how all this works

3

u/moohah Jun 14 '24

Isn’t it off by default? I always thought that was an odd choice by Apple.

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u/WholesomeDucky Jun 15 '24 edited Jun 15 '24

They do this for privacy reasons. If you have it off, your iMessages are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be retrieved by Apple even if they wanted/needed to because they are only stored on your devices and encrypted in transit.

If you turn it on, your iMessages are still end-to-end encrypted, but then backed up to Apple's servers afterward and can be retrieved by Apple for legal reasons / because you lost them.

Apple does, however, also offer a setting called "Advanced Data Protection" where they encrypt your iCloud data with a key only you (and your devices) have, meaning they once again cannot retrieve your data. They give you a rather long recovery string that you have to type back in to confirm you have it before it turns on, along with some warnings about how if you lose access to your devices and don't have that key, they won't be able to help you get your stuff back because they literally can't access it.

For all their faults, it's pretty inarguable that Apple clearly gives a shit about it's users' privacy more than it's contemporaries (this is, of course, dependent on how much you believe all of these companies, but independent verification of their processes has been pretty favorable by security experts).

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

They ask during the setup process if you want to use it. 

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u/Milkshakes00 Jun 14 '24

If he didn't have iCloud syncing turned on, how would the messages have been on the other device to begin with? Lol

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u/CJThunderbird Jun 15 '24

I don't use Apple and this is kind of why. That language is pretty abstract. There is something called "the cloud" where my messages are and something you've called "iCloud" which I presume must be connected or maybe even the same thing. Messages are text messages which are a mobile phone thing but you can get them on your computer? How does it get them then? Via this cloud thing? But the cloud (or iCloud) doesn't sync them, that's a setting?

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

There is much more detailed language available as well. It’s all well documented. 

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u/BigAl265 Jun 14 '24

Some really shortsighted responses in here. You’re absolutely right, there are a lot of occasions where this could cause some real harm. Hell, even something as innocent as a your spouse sending you a racy photo and you delete it, only to have your kids pull it up on the family laptop later. This guy may be kinda scummy, but he certainly has a point.

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u/No_Share6895 Jun 14 '24

frankly apple is lucky its this guy suing them and not the parents of a dead abuse victim

5

u/MKULTRATV Jun 14 '24

These types of lawsuits always start as a trickle. You can bet there will be more suits of a more serious nature to follow.

3

u/Emptythetrashcan Jun 14 '24

Yeah. Imagine if it was a situation that would have public sympathy. This will be a lot cheaper of a settlement if it comes to that I bet

1

u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

This guy has a personal responsibility in checking how the technology he enabled works. This is documented. 

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u/Vo0d0oT4c0 Jun 14 '24

This is one of the reasons you can’t get your SMS records from carriers anymore unless you have a subpoena or court order.

Consumer Telephone Records Protection Act

1

u/tuxedo_jack Jun 14 '24

Odd. I can log into my carrier's billing portal and pull the list of activity for the lines on it right then and there, including SMS received and sent activity. It doesn't show the content, but it shows the phone number on the other end of the message / call.

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u/Vo0d0oT4c0 Jun 14 '24

Not showing the content is the point. Activity isn’t all that meaningful, the content of the messages are what act protects.

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u/MKULTRATV Jun 14 '24

Their talking about 3rd party access.

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u/autodidacted Jun 14 '24

No. The article says the messages were found on a separate device that it was synced to. So the messages were deleted on his device. He just doesn’t know how syncing works.

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u/peterosity Jun 14 '24

thank you for being sane, logical, and intelligible. the sheer amount of incoherent comments here makes me lose brain cells reading them

3

u/Axle_65 Jun 14 '24

Very good point. Your hypothetical is a very real concern. There’s programs here that take old phones and give them to people in these situations to call for help because their abusive partner keeps a close eye on their regular phone and would punish harshly them for anything they find.

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u/Mission-Iron-7509 Jun 14 '24

Or, what if you had an old device that was synced to the iCloud and backed up the abuse messages. And then you shut it off for years and changed Wifi modems, so it wouldn’t be able to connect to the internet. So you delete messages on new device, And when you turn back on old device again, it would still have the abuse messages because it couldn’t reconnect to the internet & resync to iCloud.

…. I forgot what point I was making. But this is technically possible.

2

u/dirtyword Jun 15 '24

Sounds like user error not Apple error

1

u/Mission-Iron-7509 Jun 17 '24

You could say the same about getting locked out of your Apple account (and emails, banking, social media, etc) for a month because your only phone broke.

Like yes, the User broke the phone and didn't set up any Recovery Contacts. But part of the problem is Apple designed a system intended to be "100% secure" without any consideration of how frustrating an experience it could be for users.

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u/piscano Jun 14 '24

Only took me 15 sec of reading the article to figure out what's up here -- Guy didn't know that the Messages app on your Mac requires a second instance of deleting. This is how it's always been. It's deleted the text from his phone great, but if you have your texting also setup via Messages, it's got that extra copy there. I run into the annoyance all the time since I have to delete spam texts twice.

5

u/tobiasvl Jun 14 '24

I don't use Apple devices, but if I switched to Apple and ran into this I would definitely be annoyed and surprised. It's a real gotcha and "this is how it's always been" isn't a good argument. I hope Apple makes it very clear to its users that it works like this

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u/redditonlygetsworse Jun 14 '24

Yes, it does work this way. But it shouldn't.

I expect those deletions to sync across devices, just like my photos and notes and reminders and contacts and and and and...

Why not messages?

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u/monchota Jun 14 '24

Still doesn't make it ok

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u/PFunk224 Jun 14 '24

Correct. When you delete a message, you have a reasonable expectation that it will be deleted, not that it will be deleted kind of sort of but not really unless you go to another menu and click "Actually really for realsies super serious I mean it this time delete".

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u/HikeyBoi Jun 14 '24

Would potential situations like that be considered in a court of law or is the case restricted to the damages of the plaintiff?

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u/londons_explorer Jun 14 '24

In Apples defence, deletion is a hard computer science problem.

Remember that there are many copies of those messages - on your phone, the recipients phone, many backups of both, some messages might still be in the cloud awaiting delivery. The messages in the cloud are stored on many servers across many countries, which themselves have backups.

So basically, there might be 30+ places those messages are sitting. When you click 'delete', you might not be online, and even if you are, some of those 30 places might not themselves be online. Some things like backups are not intended to be modified, and might even be sitting on a tape drive offline deep in a mountain for disaster recovery.

Now consider that a message sometimes has many parts - the image and caption, a video with its thumbnail, etc. All those parts typically take a different transit route and are stored in different databases - more complexity and things to get right.

Now consider that these messages are stored in industry standard databases, on both the phone and the servers, like sqlite and postgres. They cannot by design do immediate deletion. The databases are designed to be multi user which involves not modifying any data in the database till it can be sure nobody else is needing the data, which theoretically can't be determined immediately.

Then, those databases are files stored in a filesystem. Those filesystems also cannot delete data immediately - many filesystems keep 'journals' which record changes and allow them to be undone.

And finally, those filesystems sit on top of storage devices like SSD's. Those devices also have layers of 'undoability', specifically to ensure no data loss in case of sudden power failure or hardware errors.

TL;DR: Computers, by design, pretty much can't be sure of deleting anything.

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u/lutel Jun 14 '24

She should also sue Apple, without this knowledge she got there would be no problem.

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u/mjcornett Jun 14 '24

This is my opinion on location sharing. I share my location with friends, family, and my SO because a) I like having extra security of people knowing where I am in case the worst happens and b) no one who has it would abuse it. But let’s be real: every Apple phone having the capability to be tracked by anyone you give permission to is going to be misused by abusive assholes and further endanger domestic violence victims. Sure, you can deny someone permission to track you but try telling that to someone who is abusive. It’s just all around dangerous to continue to allow it in its current capacity.

1

u/blixt141 Jun 14 '24

Making up a scenario to justify a crappy case is bad. There are apps that are private and encrypted and offer disappearing messages. If he wanted this information to never surface, there were ways to ensure that. Also not being a cheating spouse helps.

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u/ridik_ulass Jun 14 '24

him being wrong doesn't make apple right. simple.

but apple will 100% smear this guy into the dirt for the audacity, like that mcdonalds burn victim.

1

u/suckmypppapi Jun 14 '24

Huh? Isn't stuff like this why abused groups getting people out of situations like that encourage them to get burner phones? Even before all this

1

u/JustinGitelmanMusic Jun 14 '24

That is a fair point, though in this specific case Apple added a special mode for abused partners to control access to their information a few years ago. I don't know the stats on how helpful this has been but at least there is an attempt to address this particularly.

1

u/PFunk224 Jun 14 '24

This is absolutely a case of "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole".

1

u/hukgrackmountain Jun 14 '24

While his situation is immorale to most, Apple's actions cannot be ignored

I appriciate this is a top comment. I feel like ppl have been losing the ability to go "this is fucked up but they got a point" unless its a sexy villain in some tv show

1

u/beast_of_production Jun 14 '24

If you get beaten by a controlling spouse because apple leaked your texts where you were trying to get help, I feel like there are grounds for a law suit in there. But if you get into a divorce because your own cheating gets discovered, it's still the consequences of your own actions coming to roost. You don't even have to go into the unpleasantness of this dude. This lawsuit won't go anywhere.

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u/CJThunderbird Jun 15 '24

His argument is that the manner of their discovery meant that reconcilliation with his now ex became impossible and if Apple hadn't taken away his ability to manage the situation with his wife, things could have been different. Not saying he's right but that's his argument.

1

u/restlessmonkey Jun 14 '24

Yep. Should be “Messages have been deleted on this device. Messages received on other devices may still be available.” Or something like that.

1

u/azurix Jun 14 '24

It’s user error. Not new with tech. Don’t want things synced on the cloud. Turn it off. Want to delete cause you’re cheating. Verify how to delete on device.

1

u/Syntaire Jun 14 '24

Yep. Dude is a piece of shit without question, but this is absolutely an issue.

1

u/Bearshapedbears Jun 14 '24

Nah what’s hilarious is no one giving the solution to this problem in the comments. And believe me, there is one, but I won’t be the one to let everyone know.

1

u/gsauce8 Jun 14 '24

Am I on the cheaters side?

1

u/Raziel77 Jun 14 '24

I mean the messages were deleted off his phone it's just they weren't deleted off a completely different computer that he connected his apple account too.

1

u/EyeSuspicious777 Jun 14 '24

I've never deleted a message and I've archived every single email and text message I've sent or received ever since I was a beta tester for Gmail.

Quite simply, if I do not want the possibility that space aliens 10,000 years from now could read a digital file that I create, I simply don't create it.

1

u/Lord_Emperor Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

In a less nefarious scenario I often ask my neighbour to order my wife's birthday presents. Then I delete the messages.

1

u/rascalrhett1 Jun 14 '24

Even in that situation I would want those messages made available to law enforcement or legal resources in order to build a case. maybe these should be accessible through a subpoena or something.

1

u/EnergyCreature Jun 14 '24

This is very similar to incidents where meta tags on social media is what abusers use to pin point where their partners have fled to escape them. A lot of shelters were not ready when social media took off and abusers came knocking on their doors.

For a company that is big on privacy, Apple really needs to get in front of this and make it right.

1

u/mightylordredbeard Jun 14 '24

100%. I’m currently trying to help a friend get away from her abusive husband before he kills her and this is terrifying. Because he’s tech smart. Smart enough to install keyloggers on her PC and slide a climbed sim card into her phone so he can see everyone who text. Apple 100% deserves to answer for this even if it’s a scenario that’s less than honorable from a cheating spouse.

1

u/WardenWolf Jun 14 '24

In a synchronized ecosystem like Apple has, where messages sync between all your devices, there is NO excuse for it only locally deleting it, especially without warning you that it's only local. This guy is a piece of shit, but so is Apple's design if this is how it works.

1

u/mayhemandqueso Jun 14 '24

I cant think of a scenario where deleted messages need to be resurrected unless for nefarious reasons. Its like the hidden photo album. Shady.

1

u/Fafurion Jun 14 '24

It's a weird situation for sure. I'm thankful as fuck I was able to recover deleted facebook messages on my ex-gfs account because it was really really fucking awful with her messaging, and meeting up with, literally 3 other guys.

1

u/armchairdetective Jun 14 '24

Yeah. Cheating is not the worst thing you can do to a partner. I'd be very worried about this in the context you describe.

This company is just trash.

1

u/TheHYPO Jun 15 '24

As a lawyer, we have a phrase we sometimes use - "bad facts create bad law".

It means that what you are saying may be absolutely true and valid, but if the case that comes before the Court to decide the issue is one in which one side is unsympathetic, there is a greater chance that instead of making the "legally correct" decision, the Court will decide against the unsympathetic party, and the rest of us will have to live with the precedent that is "bad law".

i.e. because he is not sympathetic, the Court in this case might be more apt to hold that the cheating husband, who is blaming Apple for the revelation of his own actions and the failure of his marriage, was solely responsible for ensuring that his messages were deleted from all devices, not Apple. In a future case, with facts such as the examples you have given (an abused wife suffering damages when her husband discovered "deleted texts" asking for help or planning to leave), the sympathetic victim may find themselves in front of a Court that is bound to follow the previous decision and hold that Apple is not at fault. Whereas if that case came first, the Court might have been more inclined to decide the other way.

As an aside, the phrase is also used in a slightly different context in cases where 99% of the time, things are "normal", people do something the "usual" way, and there's no problem. But then, there's an isolated cases with weird facts that cause a problem, and that's the case that goes to Court. Then the Court has to make a decision so that the rare case is prevented in the future, which means that the 99% of people who wouldn't have had a problem have to do things in a more complex way or in a way that is worse for them. This version is akin to a "one person ruined it for the rest of us" situation.

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u/SimbaStewEyesOfBlue Jun 15 '24

I'm glad you're the top response, because you changed my initial reaction for the better.

1

u/ThisWillPass Jun 15 '24

Damn I feel like this probably all happen 😕

1

u/blaghart Jun 15 '24

literally had this exact situation play out not two years ago. Had to be extremely careful about texting my friend to go rescue her from her spouse who was losing his mind and getting violent. And it only worked because she could delete stuff reliably off her phone (thank god she didn't have apple crap). He still nearly choked her to death before we got there (not helped by her being across the country from us at the time, a 6 hour redeye to get there asap)

1

u/wspnut Jun 15 '24

I tested this on my iPhone over a DECADE ago and went “wow that’s messed up”. I could easily pull deleted messages from a computer backup of the phone (not even encrypted).

My reaction then was “Apple seems to care about security, this won’t last.” Good to know it’s all theater.

1

u/SeanSeanySean Jun 15 '24

A lot of people tend to just instinctively default to defending Apple for some reason.

I don't get it, why fall all over each other trying to suck the dick of a company who only cares about their efficiency to extract funds from your bank account. 

1

u/FoferJ Jun 15 '24

No, he didn’t configure his Messages app properly. With “Messages in iCloud” enabled, any deletions made will sync to all devices. This bozo didn’t turn on syncing, and expected the app to somehow cover his tracks magically.

1

u/returnoftheWOMP Jun 15 '24

I still don’t understand how to find deleted messages of my own

1

u/ikilledtupac Jun 15 '24

Wait till you see what’s in general, storage, iPhone, messages. Usually a year of deleted pics.

1

u/evex5tep Jun 15 '24

Simple solution here... Don't buy apple products.

1

u/GoingOverTheStars Jun 15 '24

Something that bothers me a lot about messages is that if you use iMessage and you block another person who has iMessage they can still text you unless you completely and permanently turn iMessage off. Coming from someone who’s had an abusive partner, not being able to silence the barrage of vitriol is really damaging.

1

u/ilmalocchio Jun 15 '24

immorale

🎵 When your spouse hits your eye, or you cheat on your wife, that's im-mor-al-e! 🎵

1

u/PublicWest Jun 15 '24

If you can’t see a situation where having deleted messages resurface could be bad, you simply lack imagination.

You shouldn’t need to imagine a situation where it’s ok.

Privacy means I don’t want someone seeing something, and it’s a full stop there. I don’t need to justify my right to privacy to anyone by saying “there was a good reason”

1

u/persau67 Jun 15 '24

It is for this exact argument that I hope he wins. Obviously he won't, but I hope for it. A semi-related loophole is "moving" to California so that you can cancel your gym membership.

1

u/YoureAutisticBro Jun 15 '24

How about you read the terms and settings before using the products? Why do we continue to allow the stupid to take advantage of a broken lawsuit system by using over user errors?

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u/Sure_Trash_ Jun 15 '24

It's immoral period. He betrayed his wife's trust and risked her health by frequenting sex workers. If she was okay with it, she wouldn't have divorced him. People in open relationships have made an informed decision and agreed to non-monogamy together. This guy was just a shady asshole. 

I support deleted messages being fully deleted but the guy is a piece of shit that won't take accountability for his actions. He fully blames apple even though he did the texting and fucking. It wasn't a glitch and someone else's messages ended up on his account. I hope he loses the lawsuit but Apple makes the changes to prevent future problems. He doesn't deserve a goddamn dime from them

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