Security News > 2024 > May > Apple wasn’t storing deleted iOS photos in iCloud after all
Security researchers reverse-engineered Apple's recent iOS 17.5.1 update and found that a recent bug that restored images deleted months or even years ago was caused by an iOS bug and not an issue with iCloud.
Today's report can now ease people's concern that Apple was indefinitely storing media users deleted a long time ago, which would have been a massive breach of privacy.
Apple fixed the bug in iOS 17.5.1, which was released on Monday.
To make matters worse, Apple's silence left room for speculation, with some thinking Apple wasn't being transparent in their data policies to images not being properly deleted from memory.
Apple removed a routine in the function responsible for scanning and re-importing photos from the filesystem, which caused it to reindex old files on the local file system and add them back to people's galleries.
Although this finding reassures users that Apple isn't storing their deleted files on the cloud and "Accidentally restoring" them one day, it also acts as a reminder that deleted files can persist in memory until the blocks are overwritten with new data.
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