Security News > 2023 > March > Google Pixel phones had a serious data leakage bug – here’s what to do!
In the image editing tool on Google's Pixel phones.
The old data - the tail-end of last week's football game, in our VCR analogy - would remain behind on the stoarge device, but it would no longer be part of the digital file containing the new image.
As Buchanan found, even though the left-over data from the previous version of the image was incomplete, and would be left alone if the file were opened with a regular image viewer.
You could nevertheless extract that left-over image data and often make some sense out of it, even though you might end up with a stream of compressed data that started part-way through.
RGB files can be huge, because there's no compression to save space, but that means you don't lose any image quality in the conversion, even though you do lose any and all data that is not directly part of the image you're interested in.
Transcoding an image into RGB format and then back, say, to PNG, is one way of ensuring that you create a totally new file that "Knows" nothing about where or how the original image was created, or what now-deleted data it might contain.