iPhone owners say latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes

It appears that Apple has a bug that is destroying data that iPhone owners thought was gone. According to a Reddit thread spotted by MacRumors, some iPhone owners are reporting that, after updating their phones to iOS 17.5, their deleted photos – some quite old – are resurfacing. iOS beta testers received the same complaints about the bug last week.

People reporting the apparent bug say they're seeing old photos in their Recent albums after Monday's update. iOS gives users the option to restore deleted photos, but they are permanently deleted after 30 days.

The person who started the thread claimed that NSFW photos they had deleted "years ago" were back on their phone. Another Reddit user said he saw the 2016 photos as new images, but didn't think he ever deleted them. And a man claimed in a later post that "approximately 300" of his old photos, some of which were "revealing", appeared on an iPad, which he had wiped in accordance with Apple's guidelines and sold to a friend. . Was.

It may be more innocent than it seems. Computer data is never actually "deleted" until it is overwritten with new 1s and 0s - operating systems simply truncate references to it. One user also said that even if they didn't sync their phone or use iCloud, they still saw a photo return, meaning the photos must have originated from on-device storage. Apple did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

There's a chance this isn't specific to Photos, as one person posted on X that they noticed old voicemails came back after the update. Many beta testers said the same thing about earlier iOS 17 betas. Whether the problem implies that Apple is secretly keeping old deleted data or it's just a quirk of how iOS 17.5 handles that data, it's not an ideal situation. No one wants their deleted nude photos back.