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Wiping a Smartphone Still Leaves Data Behind
KindMind writes "To probably no one's surprise, wiping a smartphone by standard methods doesn't get all the data erased. From an article at Wired: 'Problem is, even if you do everything right, there can still be lots of personal data left behind. Simply restoring a phone to its factory settings won't completely clear it of data. Even if you use the built-in tools to wipe it, when you go to sell your phone on Craigslist you may be selling all sorts of things along with it that are far more valuable — your name, birth date, Social Security number and home address, for example. ... [On a wiped iPhone 3G, mobile forensics specialist Lee Reiber] found a large amount of deleted personal data that he recovered because it had not been overwritten. He was able to find hundreds of phone numbers from a contacts database. Worse, he found a list of nearly every Wi-Fi and cellular access point the phone had ever come across — 68,390 Wi-Fi points and 61,202 cell sites. (This was the same location data tracking that landed Apple in a privacy flap a few years ago, and caused it to change its collection methods.) Even if the phone had never connected to any of the Wi-Fi access points, iOS was still logging them, and Reiber was able to grab them and piece together a trail of where the phone had been turned on.'"
Quick, someone tell 2008 that they have a problem with phone security.
Which begs the question: "How do blind people know when to stop wiping?"
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Quick, someone tell 2008 that they have a problem with phone security.
I tried to call the iPhone owners but they were all on AT&T and had no reception.
Then I tried to call all the Android owners but their batteries were all dead...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley