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Claude Code found 145,763 photos I permanently deleted from my iPhone. Three years of deleted photos and videos still sitting in a hidden cache. Any app with file access can read them. I plugged my iPhone into my MacBook to run a backup. Claude Code was doing the security audit from my last post and flagged a directory I wasn't even looking for. PhotoData/Thumbnails. Over 146,000 files. Photos, videos, screenshots. Every single one was something I deleted. Photos from 2023, 2024 and 2025. The ones I deleted the second after taking them. The ones I cleared from Recently Deleted. The ones I deleted three separate times because I wanted to be sure they were gone. All still there. Passport photo I took for a visa application in 2023. Screenshots of my bank app with full account numbers visible. Private photos I sent someone and immediately deleted after a breakup. Screenshot of my crypto seed phrase I took temporarily in 2022. Photo of my ID and credit card I took to remember the numbers and deleted 5 seconds later. Screenshots of my ex's private Instagram stories I saved and permanently deleted in 2023. Some were full resolution. All organized by date going back to 2021. When you delete a photo on iPhone, iOS removes it from your camera roll and Recently Deleted. It keeps a compressed copy in a Spotlight search index cache so your phone can find things when you search. Apple never clears it. Not after 30 days. Not after a year. Never. They told you it was permanently deleted. It wasn't. I checked which apps on my phone had Files and Folders access. 23 apps. Weather apps. QR code scanners. PDF readers. A flashlight app I downloaded in 2022. Any one of them could have been reading every photo I ever deleted this entire time. Went from 23 apps to 3 in about two minutes. Full step by step below. Takes 2 minutes. Save it so you don't lose it and send it to anyone with an iPhone.

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.