iPhone Owners Say Latest iOS Update Is Resurfacing Deleted Nudes

Apple appears to have a bug that is extracting data that iPhone owners thought was gone. Some iPhone owners are reporting that after updating their phones to iOS 17.5, their deleted photos — some quite old — are appearing again, according to a report. Reddit Thread what MacRumors identified. iOS beta testers I had the same complaints about the bug last week.

People who reported the apparent bug say they’re seeing old photos appearing in their Recents album after Monday’s update. iOS gives users the option to restore deleted photos, but after 30 days, they must be removed permanently. The person who started the thread claimed that the NSFW photos they had deleted “years ago” were back on their phones. Another Reddit user said they saw photos from 2016 appear as new images, but that I didn’t think they ever deleted them.

This may be more innocent than it seems. Computer data is never actually “deleted” until it is replaced by new 1s and 0s – operating systems simply cut off references to it. A user also said they saw a photo come back, although don’t sync your phone or use iCloud, which implies that the photos may be coming from the storage on the device. Apple did not respond immediately On the edgerequest for comment.

There’s a chance it’s also not specific to photos, like a person posted in X that they saw old voicemails coming back after the update. Several beta testers said the same thing about previous beta versions of iOS 17. 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. Nobody wants to see their deleted nudes come back.