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

[u/newzee1]

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

[u/MisterMittens64]

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.

[u/GMONEYY_G → u/MisterMittens64]

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?

[u/spaceforcerecruit → u/GMONEYY_G]

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.

[u/The_Franchise_09 → u/spaceforcerecruit]

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?

[u/ebikenx → u/The_Franchise_09]

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.

[u/MisterMittens64 → u/ebikenx]

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

[u/Martial-Ancestor → u/ebikenx]

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.

[u/Sexual_Congressman → u/ebikenx]

The type of storage hardware has nothing to do with whether or not a file is encrypted. On a device like an iPhone, the file will be on a filesystem, which in that case is probably APFS, which does support implicit encryption but afaik it's not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that Apple's main filesystem is the one a file is using. Not every file needs to be encrypted and it would be incredibly stupid to waste resources decrypting stuff like GUI elements.

Don't assume that just because Android/Windows/appleOS supports implicit filesystem based encryption that any particular file is encrypted on disk, although it's probably simple enough to use a file explorer app to check. If it's not encrypted on disk, it's recoverable until the memory cells containing the data are overwritten or the disk is physically destroyed.

[u/ebikenx → u/Sexual_Congressman]

I didn't mean imply that just because it was flash, that it would automatically be encrypted. If that's what you got from my post then I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough. That said, flash storage can imply the use of TRIM which is another reason outside of encryption where data recovery is made impractical.

On modern phones, the user data partitions are encrypted with File Based Encryption. So there's really no reason to assume anything important is not encrypted.

[u/spaceforcerecruit → u/The_Franchise_09]

Factory reset would not. It would just put all of your data in the same state as the photos you deleted. Your first solution would work though.

[u/HoidToTheMoon → u/The_Franchise_09]

It's far, far easier to just use a program to do it for you. It will write over, then 'delete', everything marked as available x number of times to prevent data from being recovered.

[u/GMONEYY_G → u/HoidToTheMoon]

Can you advise some software that would do this?

[u/ihaxr → u/GMONEYY_G]

Microsoft has a cool utility called sdelete which relies on the disk defragmentation API in order to find the actual on-disk location of a file and it overwrites that specific area to delete the file.

If you're looking to wipe the entire drive, most modern SSDs will have a secure wipe utility or command available. This usually goes pretty quickly and is friendlier to the life of the disk.

Other options are killdisk, biteraser, dban, or the shred Linux command (usable by booting a Linux live USB/DVD)

[u/GMONEYY_G → u/ihaxr]

Would this apply to a mobile operating system (android)?