Selling Your iPhone? Your Data May Remain Despite Doing a Full Restore
Posted on 20 May 2008, at 8:47 am, by Wayne Schulz
When the 3G iPhone ships many people will be selling their old iPhones. What they may not realize is some of data may survive a full iPhone system restore (the common way to wipe existing data). This observation is documented by developer Jonathan Zdziarski who posts this iPhone privacy alert on his web site:
May 5, 2008: iPhone Privacy Alert: Restore Mode Leaves Much Personal Data Intact Many iPhone users have felt safe sending their phones into Apple or selling them on eBay with the feeling that their personal data and digital past have been erased by performing a restore. Think those embarrassing photos are gone for good? Think again. While the restore process takes long enough to make most people (including many well-respected iPhone developers) assume the “disk” stored in NAND memory is formatted, it actually isn’t.
Link: Jonathan Zdziarski Web Site via: TUAW
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May 20th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Wow! How do we actually erase then?
May 20th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
He doesn’t appear to offer a solution, just the warning.
So now I guess we hope that someone comes up with a solution unless we’re clever enough to come up with one of our own!
May 20th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I really HATE reading stories like this.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Technically… all a software programmer has to do is make a eraser program that will write random characters into all unallocated spots in the NAND memory. Has Apple released a software developers kit yet?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Allen, they did months ago, but I don’t think that there are any eraser programs available…yet. Sure seems like a product that should be available.