• mojo_raisin@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Nothing sinister, we just don’t delete what we say we delete. Instead we keep it in your profile to feed the algorithms and set the “deleted” flag to make you think it’s gone.

    • Simon Müller@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      I mean, to be completely fair, that’s how data storage works.

      We cannot really just make data disappear, so we let it get overwritten instead

      • mojo_raisin@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        But clearly the data is not overwritten and this was intentional. How do I know? Because that would amount to a massive amount of data, if it was de to a bug in Apple software or underlying filesystems, it would be detected in monitoring systems “Hey, we’re using 10x the data we should be, maybe we should look into it”.

        The mistake was in the flag code that was supposed to fool us.

        • Simon Müller@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          no when I say “overwritten” I mean that the area is set as deleted in the filesystem and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.

            A single overwrite might not be enough to defeat physical forensics because shadows of the old data persist in how the new data is stored. Also when it comes to SSDs you might be waiting a long time for the data to get overwritten as the drive will wear-level its erm sectors (what are those things called with SSDs?).

          • mojo_raisin@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            So are you saying that they suffered from a filesystem bug that caused deletion failure? I’d imagine they use standard filesystems on their backend, I haven’t heard about any bugs like this.

            If you ask me, what’s more likely, that a company known for shitty behavior lies about deleting files so they can continue to use that information to profit, – OR – that they are experiencing a filesystem bug on their backend, I’ll choose the former.

            • Simon Müller@sopuli.xyz
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              7 months ago

              no I don’t believe a damn word of what apple’s gonna say on this, I just wanted to get the message out there that generally file deletion works by allowing data to be overwritten, so if the images are local this could very well just be that either it’s showing data that hasn’t been overwritten yet or it accidentally brought things out of the “recently deleted” depending on how long ago it was deleted.

            • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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              7 months ago

              Undeleting nudes

              That’s iPhone

              Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this. Any crap they pull needs to have a perfectly proper explanation, with our agreement to a specific term buried somewhere in their policies. Can only imagine how much money they blew throwing these billboards up all over the San Francisco Bay area. We have to buy Apple over Google for ostensible privacy gains, and Apple has to lock us in to their walled gardens to make up for their comparatively smaller ad/data business.

              This post assumes Apple is aethical (that’s like amoral but for ethics right?) but still a self-interested economic actor. They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!

              • mojo_raisin@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Seriously: I don’t think the cost benefit is there to intentionally make a maneuver like this.

                You might be right

                They can’t let short-term greed get in the way of long-term greed!

                lol

      • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        the shred command in Linux tries to do this, but it may not work if the hardware moves rewritten data blocks around to mitigate wear.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          7 months ago

          shred doesn’t even necessarily work at the OS level. If you use something like ext3 and I assume ext4, normally when you overwrite data in a file, you’re not overwriting data even at the logical level in the block device. Journalling entails that you commit data to somewhere else on the disk, then update the metadata atomically to reference the new data.

          It was more-practical in an era of older filesystems.

      • solarvector@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        That’s skipping over the fact that recovering deleted data, even if it isn’t overwritten, is not an “oops”. It it takes extra effort, and if that data isn’t being protected it would be overwritten incidentally as drives are used.

        There is a big difference in a database between “flagging” data and actually removing the association of the data to the database.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      That’s how a lot of people handle deleted data in database, it’s literally just a flag. That’s why there’s a recommendation to edit Reddit posts before deleting them, to ensure they’re actually overwritten so they can’t just be restored.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          Yes, that’s certainly possible, but it’s also out of my control. I have basically three options:

          1. Delete account - we know this doesn’t delete comments
          2. Delete comment - “seems” to delete comments, but we’ve seen comments get restored - so probably using a “deleted” flag
          3. Edit comment with nonsense and when delete - should poison comment if they’re just using the deleted flag

          That’s it. There’s no guarantee it works, but it has a much higher chance of working than the other two.

          And there’s a good chance they delete old backups. Hosting every edit is expensive, so there’s a decent chance they clean up old data after some months.

    • Thann
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      7 months ago

      They don’t care about your security or privacy, they care about being the exclusive vendor of your personal information.