It’s probably nothing sinister, though.

And a person claimed in a later post that “around 300” of their old pictures, some of which were “revealing,” appeared on an iPad they’d wiped per Apple’s guidelines and sold to a friend.

How would that even work? Wiping a device resets the encryption keys, doesn’t it?

It sounds like these aren’t still on the device somewhere, but re-downloaded from iCloud.

So presumably the device ID is somehow being used to incorrectly “authenticate” to iCloud and old images are being restored.

This definitely raises some major concerns about how iCloud authentication works.

meseek #2982
link
fedilink
56M

It actually doesn’t seem possible as there are too many systems that need to fail for it be true. The encryption key, access to another Apple ID and Photos having access to it all.

We are finding out that it’s not the images that are restored, but the thumbnails. Which is why the images are low quality when opened. The original photos are gone but the thumbnails still survive on Apple’s servers. Likely just cached. Which of course only applies to those logged into their accounts, not on other wiped devices.

And the images are tied to an Apple ID.

So somehow the fully factory reset iPad accidentally logged in to the old Apple ID and merged deleted photos to the new Apple ID

Both seem equally improbable.

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.97K Posts
  • 74.6K Comments
  • Modlog