After the public beta of iOS 17.5 was released, iPhone users reported in large numbers that they saw photos in their mobile gallery that had been deleted for several years. Regarding recordings, many people were concerned that unauthorized parties could access the most sensitive images, especially through devices sold at the time, which would have meant a serious invasion of privacy.
Apple has not released official information about the case, so the silence gave room for further assumptions that the company can keep deleted content indefinitely, which users can restore for 30 days from the storage space allocated for deleted files.
On Monday, the company finally issued an out-of-service update to fix the bug, but did not provide additional clarification, however I confessThe package “fixes a rare issue where photos that were previously corrupted due to a database error can reappear in the photo library, even after they've been deleted.”
Are you claiming a Padawan yet?Our January broadcast on Al-Saghir TV did not touch on the higher education aspects of the topic. We are changing this now. |
Are you claiming a Padawan yet?
Our January broadcast on Al-Saghir TV did not touch on the higher education aspects of the topic. We are changing this now.
Synactiv analysts used reverse engineering methods to scan the latest iOS 17.5.1 version, which already contains the patch, and then… I discovered that the developers made changes to the “PhotoLibraryServices” service, including the “PLModelMigrationActionRegistration_17000” function, to fix the bug. The function responsible for scanning and re-importing deleted images from the file system needed to be fixed, resulting in old files being re-indexed in the local file system and displayed again in user galleries.
This may be reassuring to those concerned from the point of view that Apple does not store deleted files in the cloud, but the recovery error indicates that recordings may be found in the devices' local storage for a longer period than expected.
