iOS 17.5 is allegedly resurfacing pictures that were deleted years ago

Allegedly “deleted” not allegedly resurfacing. Thank god for our security apparatus overlords for mantaining permanent backups for posterity sake.<p>So much for Apple’s We take privacy seriously tag line

I remember around 10 years ago when iCloud Photo Stream (the predecessor to today&#x27;s iCloud Photos) first appeared. At that time, Apple still had a fairly decent reputation for software quality. Things have markedly deteriorated since.<p>Even then, something didn&#x27;t sit right about uploading every photo I snap into some giant black box in the sky—encrypted or not. I never once switched this feature on. Not that I&#x27;m taking lots of NSFW pictures or anything, but, maybe there were a few.<p>I sleep well at night not worrying whether this bug turns out to be real. I&#x27;ll back up my own photos, thanks. And I&#x27;ll delete them on my own schedule.

I wonder if the photos are&#x2F;were in some stuck state still in tmp space on the phone and are being picked up in a retry loop. Some people have noted the same set of photos keep showing back up are recently uploaded after re-deleting them.

I was on 17.4 and I took screenshots of my recent pictures, then deleted a recent picture, then upgraded to 17.5. I did not see the deleted picture or any of my older deleted pictures come back.<p>It seems like there’s clearly a bug (based on the number of reports) just not one that affects everyone.

Just want to add a recent experience I had on this issue. I accidentally deleted a bunch of photos on my Mac (including from &quot;recently deleted&quot;) and didn&#x27;t realize it deletes it from my emtire iCloud photo library. In a state of panic, I contacted apple and they were able to restore all the photos that were &quot;permanently deleted &quot; from the last 60 days. This surprised me quite a bit as I was not expecting them to get them back. Makes me think if any pictures on the cloud are truly deleted.

Really makes me think that what would people that buys their &quot;Privacy. That&#x27;s iPhone&quot; ads think when they know about this, obviously, most of them won&#x27;t, though.

I had an older 32GB iPad which always showed 8G of photos with a fully empty roll (including Deleted album). Rarely has enough space for automatic updates.<p>Never could figure out where it went . Even backups using libmobiledevice were tiny.<p>Factory reset “fixed” it..

I wonder what the fallout of this will be, it seems a lot worse than the maps launch that&#x27;s given as the reason for Scott Forstall leaving the company.

Privacy. That&#x27;s iPhone.

Better resurface them now than later

7 year gdpr data retention?

It&#x27;s just the syncing between iCloud and NSA servers had a glitch.<p>Nothing to worry about here, move on. Look! Our new iPhone, it has Titanium!<p>We value your privacy, yada yada.