Arvind Chauhan

🚨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?