THE RECENTLY DELETED FOLDER, WHICH APPARENTLY ISN’T (The Daily Whatever Press) — A man on Twitter (I’m never calling it X) says he plugged his Android phone into a laptop, told Claude Code to hunt for pictures of his face that he never took, and got back 14,219 of them.
He didn’t take them. His phone did.
The user goes by Cooler (@coolerwave), and according to Cybernews, he says the images came from the front-facing and infrared cameras that run face unlock. They stretched back about 15 months, complete with timestamps and location data, and they were parked in a cache folder for face unlock, nowhere near the gallery or Recently Deleted, where no normal human being would ever think to look.
“Phone kept taking photos while I was reading this,” he wrote.
Ew. Just…ewwww.
Then he ran the same search on an iPhone backup and, by his account, found more than 145,000 images and videos sitting under PhotoData/Thumbnails, some dating back to 2021, every one of them something he says he deleted. In the pile: a passport photo from a visa application, banking screenshots showing account numbers, a photo of an ID and a credit card, and the seed phrase to his crypto wallet.
The seed phrase. The one string of words you’re supposed to guard like the nuclear football, chilling in a thumbnail folder like a gum wrapper at the bottom of a purse.
And the number keeps growing. Cyber Security News put it at 214,856 deleted photos and videos on a Google Pixel, hiding in a folder called DCIM/.thumbnails. Every outlet that touches this story comes back with a bigger haul, and every version ends in the same place: your phone kept the stuff you told it to throw away.
So now we need one machine to snitch on the other. The most useful thing an AI did all week was narc on a phone. It’s gonna be a chilly Thanksgiving at the imaginary cyberworld party, where all the other digital avatars freeze out Claude for being a snitch.
Who the hell can see these?
This is the part that made my skin crawl.
Cooler’s answer is blunt: “Any app with file access can read them.” If he’s right, that means every flashlight app, every coupon app, and every free game you downloaded in 2019 and forgot about could go rummaging through your passport photo like a raccoon in a dumpster.
Think about all the times you’ve had that front facing camera pointed at you while you were in bed, or brushing your teeth, or….gooning, just for example, totally not thinking about a thing I may or may not have done while using my phone for personal entertainment purposes AS ANY ADULT IS ALLOWED TO DO IN THE PRIVACY OF HIS OWN BED. *ahem*