the archangel

BREAKING: Claude Code found 14,219 photos of my face on my Android that I never took. Phone was secretly taking them almost every time I picked it up. Even when I was just lying in bed. Even at home. Not screenshots. Real frames from the front camera. On the train. In the car. At home. When I just grabbed it to check the time. They were just sitting in a system cache. Timestamps and GPS on them. Nothing in Gallery. Nothing in Recently Deleted. Plugged the phone into my laptop, made a full backup, told Claude Code to look for any front-camera files that weren’t in my photos. It pulled /data/system/users/0/faceunlock/cache and another folder inside Google Play Services. Over 14 thousand files. Normal ones and infrared from Face Unlock. Every single one had time and location. Started scrolling. Almost everything from the last 15 months. Then I saw a file created 2 seconds ago. I was still looking at the folder. Phone kept taking photos while I was reading this. Google and the phone makers say Face Unlock turns everything into a mathematical model and deletes the image right away. On this phone the raw frames were just sitting there. Some of the processes writing to that folder were from system diagnostics. Couple of old apps that still had camera permission could also get in. Turned off diagnostics, revoked camera access from everything that doesn’t need it, cleared the cache. But how many of these frames already went somewhere else, I don’t know. If you want to check yours, plug it in, make a full backup or use ADB, and ask Claude to look for front-camera files outside your Gallery. Path above is where mine were.