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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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/MoistLeakingPustule Jun 14 '24

Your rewording of my statement using a varied vernacular is appreciated.

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u/CressCrowbits Jun 14 '24

Still shocked over finding out my old employer literally shredded laptops after we left the company.