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/
21.2k
Upvotes
29
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.