Your data will probably never disappear

The iPhone's "old photos reappearing" error after updating to iOS 17.5 accidentally revealed a forgotten truth of the Internet: The delete button is just a blatant lie of Big Tech, your data will probably never go away.

According to Wired, re-displaying deleted photos is not new and is not limited to large corporations that own cloud platforms. More than a decade ago, Wired author Lauren Goode discovered that a set of photos she had deleted reappeared on a photo storage application. After notifying the app developer, she was told it was just a software error. Later, this application was acquired by Amazon. Lauren Goode said her photos were also bought by Amazon.

Even if this isn't an error, the reality is that your photos are being stored on both your device and someone else's cloud storage.

We don't own the entire cloud but rent it from giant tech companies on a monthly basis and pay a fee to maintain it. We can still delete our photos from the cloud, but that's just our thinking.

There are many different types of 'delete' by Big Tech

When you delete an image on your phone, it deletes the local copy on the device while also sending a notification to the cloud server and from there, to your other devices. When you delete photos on a phone that's not connected to wifi, it just 'pretends' to delete it until you reconnect to the Internet.

When you tap the Delete button on the iPhone's photos app, the photo isn't actually deleted immediately, explains Thomas Reed, chief technology officer at security firm Malwarebytes. Instead, deleted photos are placed in the Recently Deleted list on the app, and they are no longer listed in any albums. This means that those photos actually remain in their original location just that the internal Photos database remembers that it has to be deleted.

Google's deletion stages include soft deletion, hard deletion, and expiration. Copies of deleted data in all cloud services will be marked as free storage and overwritten over time, similar to traditional hard drives, the company said.

In addition, there is also a temporary deletion feature, allowing deleted files to be restored in a short time. After you delete files from your device, both Apple and Google have a policy of retaining your photos for 30 or 60 days. After that, the photos will supposedly disappear from your device again.

In Google Photos, if you don't use your account for 2 years, Google may automatically delete your content.

Once you've sent a photo to someone else or posted it on a social network, other people can download it, screenshot it, or share it elsewhere. That photo is then in the hands of others, even if you have deleted it from your device, your personal bits (data) are still there.

So it's a fact that your photos aren't actually deleted.

David Pac

Update 24 May 2024