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BarkingGhost

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 18, 2011
231
3
Atlanta+35 miles
Wife and I bought our iPhone 5's back in April. As a personal decision, we do not keep emails, messages or pictures/movies on our phones. We download them and or delete them, but store nothing on them. We also do NOT use iCloud services ... or so we thought.

This month I noticed the PhotoStream tab under the Photos app. I clicked it and was stunned to see every picture and video I created since April was there. I noticed I could delete them, but I was more concerned this content was now in Apple's iCloud--something I didn't want.

Under Settings>General>Photos I found where to disable this somehow enabled option and it prompted me if I wished to delete the content. I chose to delete it, and concluded iCloud's PhotoStream kept copies in Apple's cloud. I went to my wife's phone and sure enough all photo and video content I created locally on my phone had been copied to her phone as well.

I disabled the option on her phone, accepted the prompted deletion offering and figured that was it. Our 1st gen iPad doesn't have this option even though it is running iOS6. Our third gen iPad was found with the service already disabled.

My concern is the intrusive nature of Apple. I no more think my content is gone from Apple's iCloud than can be safely proven. I'm guessing I could test this by re-enabling the option on a phone, but how can I remove it permanently from the cloud?

BTW, these iPhone 5's are our first and last ones since the wife is upset over this.
 
Not sure what your question is. As you already found, you can delete images from your photo stream on the phone (see here for more). You will not find any "proof" that all traces and backups of your images are deleted from Apple's servers though.

The option was probably turned on when you activated the device. If you enter your iCloud credentials when setting up a new device, it will activate a number of services automatically. Therefore you should either not enter them or carefully check the iCloud settings before starting to use the device next time.

All that said, I don't think you need to be paranoid about Apple sharing your private images. If they did that and it came out, it would damage their business. You and your wife may want to consider using separate iCloud accounts though to avoid unintended sharing.

BTW, if you are thinking about switching to Android because of this "incident", be warned that Google is probably more "intrusive" than Apple when it comes to pushing use of their cloud services.
 
I'm not a fan of Android or Google, and I am not an fan of Opt Out (prefer Opt In). And its not about sharing between the wife and I, but us vs. everyone else. Now the wife will not use the iPhone camera because of trust.
 
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