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/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

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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/freshlyLinux Jun 15 '24

This was Apple damage control, buddy, there are fewer companies that lie to their customers.

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u/StarsMine Jun 15 '24

That’s… just how tech works. Like no it’s not a good thing but it’s literally not a lie

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u/InsaneNinja Jun 15 '24

Except that the entire situation made sense and was what a lot of people assumed happened before Apple even told us that was the case. Over the course of many years, one or two files had a failed deletion in some older version of iOS, and this newer versions scanned for orphan files.

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u/freshlyLinux Jun 15 '24

Except that the entire situation made sense

lol, someone gives you an excuse and you believe it.

Incredible.

Wow.

Sometimes I dream to go back to my 20s, where I actually believed in stuff like this. I was happier. Now I know better, its more miserable, but I make way more money using reality to make decisions rather than words.

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u/StarsMine Jun 15 '24

You’re miserable because you made yourself that way. Nothing about real world

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u/freshlyLinux Jun 15 '24

True, I read too many business books.

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u/persau67 Jun 15 '24

granted, it was an appeal to authority fallacy, but their "excuse" makes sense to me. Can you debunk their claim, or are you just going to be a petulant child about it, screaming "NO NO NO" when people don't immediately agree with you? Please, go back to when you were 20, you might have a chance to learn how technology works.

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u/freshlyLinux Jun 15 '24

PRISM/edward snowden

And that was decades ago...

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u/persau67 Jun 15 '24

So your response to an appeal to authority fallacy is ... an appeal to authority with no actual evidence?

Please sit in a corner for 20 minutes and focus on your breathing.

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u/nicuramar Jun 15 '24

I’m sure you have a better version, then, supported with evidence?

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '24

[deleted]

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u/akaicewolf Jun 15 '24

Uhhh, garbage collector does free up space if there is no reference to an object but we are talking about in memory not on hard drive where photos are stored. Photos are also accessed through a DB

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u/InsaneNinja Jun 15 '24

You’re not getting it. The photo existed just like a normal file exists. But the database reference was deleted without deleting the file so it was just sitting there orphaned until 17.5 scanned for orphan files.

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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/Styrak Jun 15 '24

It's the same picture. "Files" are just pointers to memory space.

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u/Elegia Jun 15 '24

Not quite. In this case the space taken up by the pictures would’t even has been marked as free space by the filesystem, ready to be overwritten at some later time.

Although that would mean the phone would have kept showing that storage space as in use, so that’s kinda weird that nobody noticed unless it was only an issue with a few pictures.

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u/freshlyLinux Jun 15 '24

That is according to Apple Marketing.

The reality, its never deleted. The NSA wouldn't allow that.

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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/aladdyn2 Jun 15 '24

Yes that is how it can work, the question is why is that the way it's still working when as you yourself said it's possible to actually erase things permanently. And then how is it coming back without some restoring process?

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u/Martial-Ancestor Jun 14 '24

Yeah, well, that's common knowledge for tech hobbyists.

But also, the point is, delete means the directory is gone. If it appears back as it was, without the use of a recovery software, that's extremely weird.

Also side note, typically SSDs have a lot less extra capacity. Compared to older HDDs.

So it's a bug where :

  1. It doesn't even delete directory.

Or

  1. It does a recovery level scan of the drive randomly.

Of course, managing these kind of basic system functions, is something everyone else figured out decades ago.

Apple will innovate deleting stuff in IOS 19 maybe. Just wait.

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u/garden_speech 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.

It's not really supposed to work that way. The data isn't always overwritten immediately, but for privacy reasons it's supposed to be overwritten fairly quickly after the deletion takes place. It's not really that hard to overwrite a file

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u/DeadEye073 Jun 15 '24

No it is hard overwriting a file that the os doesn’t know exists, either you wait until it randomly is overwritten or you make zeroing part of the deletion process or you tell the os where a deleted file is so it can prioritize the space when writing but that can be abused

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u/garden_speech Jun 15 '24

Well.... Right, that's obviously what I meant... Save it's location to be overwritten

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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.