This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Geek Banter, Geek Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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If you’re trolling eBay and craigslist trying to find out what you can get for your old iPhone, you might want to take a moment to consider your file privacy.
There have been a series of discussions about file security on the iPhone since it was released. Apple’s restore (even the “Erase all content and settings”) feature on the iPhone does not actually delete the data, which means that is completely accessible to anyone with the proper software tools.
So what is an eager wannabe 3G iPhone owner to do?
1. Keep your old iPhone as a backup, and don’t sell it all.
2. Use the Erase all content and settings, and then completely fill the phone with mp3 files (legal ones of course.. ) and rinse and repeat x 3…
Once you have put a collection of useless data on the phone ( filling the memory completely is a vital step here) it will make retrieving any of the actual data that was on the phone originally a heck of a lot harder. However, it is still possible for the more zealous voyeur of your data.
The iPhone has been targeted more then other devices for this particular issue, but it should be noted that data recovery is almost always possible on any type of media. Remember the Columbia space shuttle the crashed, the drive was found in a dry lake bed and handed to a team at Kroll Ontrack about six months after the tragedy,, and yet… [ 99% data recovery ]
So, the lesson here is that unless you REALLY REALLY need the money, selling old hard drives, and other memory storage devices is not a good idea. As far as the iPhone goes, most of your buyers will not be doing the Columbia style data recovery, so step 2 should be sufficient to feel comfortable dumping it for the 3G.
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