iPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do

The_AV8R writes "Jonathan Zdziarski showed that every time you press the Home button on your iPhone, a screen capture is taken in order to produce a visual effect. This image is then cached and later deleted. Zdziarski says that there have been cases of law enforcement looking up sex offenders' old data and checking recovered screenshots." This revelation occurred in the midst of a webcast on iPhone forensics, demonstrating how to bypass the iPhone's password security (not trivial, but doable). Video from the talk is not online yet but is promised soon over at O'Reilly.

Comments

Re:Anybody know if he was hacking 2.1?

[TheLostSamurai]

These screen shots are for debugging plain and simple. All of the software I write which has a user interface has the ability to save screenshots at any point during execution so that I figure out what a user was doing that caused the program to crash. It saves about 100 screenshots and the starts erasing older ones as space gets filled.

I'm not sure how Apple uses these shots, if they do at all, but the ability to take screenshots is an invaluable tool for software debugging.

don't forget the "calendar"

[commodoresloat]

The iPhone has a really invasive program that actually keeps track of all your appointments, dates, meetings; pretty much everything you do every day of your life. I can't believe Apple is getting away with this surveillance!!