⚠️⚠️🚨🚨MEU DEUS, COMO ASSIM PONTEIROS EXISTEM???? ENTÃO QUANDO UM ITEM É "DELETADO" ISSO SÓ SIGNIFICA QUE O PONTEIRO DE METADATA PARA DE APONTAR PRA ONDE A DATA FÍSICA ESTÁ, DANDO PERMISSÃO PARA O SISTEMA OPERACIONAL SOBREESCREVELA😱😱🤯🤯🚨🚨⚠️⚠️
🚨BREAKING NEWS : Your "deleted" photos aren't deleted.
Claude Code found years of them sitting in a hidden cache on my iPhone.
I plugged my iPhone into my MacBook to run a backup. I had Claude Code doing a security check at the same time. It flagged something I wasn't looking for. A directory called PhotoData/Thumbnails.
Thousands of files. Photos, videos, screenshots. A lot of them were things I had deleted.
Photos from a couple of years ago. Screenshots I took and deleted a few seconds later. Stuff I went into Recently Deleted and cleared. Some of it was still sitting there.
What I found in that cache:
- old screenshots of banking apps
- photos I deleted right after taking them
- random pictures I didn't want on my phone anymore
- a few things I specifically remember deleting more than once
When you delete a photo on iPhone, iOS removes it from your camera roll and Recently Deleted folder. But it keeps a compressed copy in a Spotlight search cache so your phone can still find things when you search. That cache doesn't get fully cleared.
I checked which apps had Files and Folders access. There were more than I expected, including apps I downloaded a long time ago and forgot about. Any of them could potentially read files from that cache.
I went through the list and removed access from most of them.
The prompt I used is below. It doesn't take long if you already have a backup.
How many apps on your phone have Files access right now?