Apple’s latest IOS update; IOS 17.5, is causing an interesting stir in the tech space. Reports on Reddit and other social media platforms assert that the latest IOS update is resurfacing old media that was presumed to be permanently deleted by the users.
Some reports on Reddit are alleging that images they had been deleted from way back in 2010 had resurfaced on their devices as new photos. Others also claimed that voicemails they deleted years ago had resurfaced on their devices.
Clearly, this is a bug of some sort but at this moment we do not know the true nature of its exploit, what we can speculate is that it retrieves data tied to a user’s Apple ID, data that would be in the cloud (in this case iCloud). However, the issue is that these images are to be deleted because Apple (and many other cloud services) has a policy that says images deleted for more than 30 days cannot be retrieved, to the average user that would mean that the deleted media would be gone.
The resurgence of supposedly deleted images, from a company that purports an extreme hold on privacy is very worrying. This bug’s exploits seem to also open another can of worms; nothing is ever truly deleted from the internet.
In all, we will keep an eye on what ensues with this update but be cautious before doing the update. If you do update your device and have some old media return, report it to Apple. Apple has not commented for now, and we await an update to fix this bug so until then, stay safe folks.
