iOS 17.5 users complain about automatic recovery of deleted private photos

iOS 17.5 is a relatively small update, with the biggest innovations intended for the European Union, such as support for third-party app stores. But unexpectedly, it turned out that this update contains a bug that allows the system to restore long-deleted photos on its own. For some users, these were files deleted a long time ago.

Interestingly, this bug was reported last week by beta testers using the public beta version of the system. And despite these reports, the bug made it into the release version of the system.

Of course, iOS, like the vast majority of operating systems, allows you to recover deleted files within 30 days, but there is a user report that said that intimate photos were deleted "several years ago". In a discussion on Reddit, users reported the reincarnation of images from 2016. They also complained about the recovery of images on devices that had been factory reset and sold. There are users who reported recovering deleted photos that were never synced to iCloud. Some voice messages were also recovered.

Most likely, the problem is that files on any OS are never physically deleted. The data is simply marked as inactive and the system ignores it until another file overwrites it. This greatly increases the lifespan of drives and their speed, but is a known security issue. Therefore, it is recommended to delete confidential data with the help of specialised programmes that will overwrite the space that has been freed up several times with other files.

For some reason, iOS 17.5 broke this mechanism and started displaying files regardless of whether they were marked as deleted or not. This is a pretty serious privacy crisis, so we expect an update to fix the bug as soon as possible.

Source: TheVerge