After dissecting Apple's most recent iOS 17.5.1 release, security experts discovered that an iOS bug — rather than an iCloud problem — was the source of a recent fault that recovered photographs that had been deleted months or even years earlier.
Apple appeared to have failed to address people's legitimate concerns and stayed mute about the underlying source of the worrying issue, despite several reports from consumers and tech outlets verifying it.
The information released today allays people's fears that Apple was secretly archiving media files that customers had long since removed, which would have constituted a serious privacy violation.
Following the public beta release of iOS 17.5, some iPhone owners have noticed that deleted photographs have suddenly reappeared on their devices.
This flaw was included in the final release, which affected a considerably larger user base and led to multiple Reddit posts of the issue.
"I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly," a user said in the Reddit thread.
"Same happened here photo from September 2022 just appeared out of nowhere in recent section in photos app , weird," reported another user.
It soon became apparent that something else was going on because the restored photographs were significantly older than the 30 days that iOS's "Recently Deleted" feature is configured to save files for.