Well this is interesting. I plugged my phone into my computer to pull some photos off of it and I just happen to start browsing it via Windows Explorer since the device shows up there. Imagine my surprise when I saw things that were in my Hidden folder show up clear as day. It seems that lock is only at an application level and just browsing the file system it’s there to see.
Does anyone else experience something similar? Is there a note I missed that it’s still be available via other means?
Hidden is not encrypted and when you trust the computer you’re connecting to you have access to the phone’s file system.
Not a bug, a design choice to allow accessing your device photos on an attached computer.
I know hidden is not encrypted, but the level things can be hidden can vary too. You can have parts of the filesystem that are not shown to the USB driver without additional authentication pretty easily.
Personally I like the way that this is implemented; makes it easy to download hidden media files onto my Mac. Anyways, if you’re worried about nudes/pr0n being seen by unauthorized parties, I wouldn’t recommend stashing them in your photos library anyways. There are vault-type apps in the App Store that masquerade as note/calculator apps (Calculator# comes to mind) which are more suited to addressing OP’s use case.