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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bySeaFox ( 739806 ) writes:
Unfortunately, it seems most people are really bad at wiping their phone of personal data before passing it on to a stranger.
How many people actually have the ability to securely wipe data on their phone to start with, without rooting it? For lots of folks, the "factory reset" option is the only thing they can do on their own, and that likely only deletes prefs and network settings and erases file system directory info. It does not overwrite the bits in the phone's storage to make them unrecoverable.
byMr0bvious ( 968303 ) writes:
As stated above this really should be an inbuilt OS feature - "Reset for resale"
It shouldn't take an understanding or knowledge of the intricacies of how the device works or how to properly erase data. It should be automatically done by the OS since most phone users do not know how to do it properly.
byAnonymous Coward writes:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5661
byMr0bvious ( 968303 ) writes:
That's a good start, but I doubt it over writes any data - this *seems* like a soft delete and I'd expect one could still get the original data (??)
It'd also be nice if Android had such a feature built in.
bySJ( 13711 ) writes:
Nope... Apple iPhones actually securely erases the encryption keys which renders the contents of the storage useless.
It's a big button called "Erase All Contents and Settings". It does precisely that.
byL4t3r4lu5 ( 1216702 ) writes:
Well no, it doesn't. You've contradicted yourself. What iOS does is delete the encryption key, as you stated, which renders the data inaccessible without recovering the key. The data is still entirely intact; Just really, really hard to recover :)
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bybiodata ( 1981610 ) writes:
Unless you have the backdoor key
byBasilBrush ( 643681 ) writes:
Apple have issued guidance to law enforcement and security service on what they can and can't retrieve from an iPhone if given a court order. For a wiped phone it is nothing. There is no backdoor.
byganjadude ( 952775 ) writes:
The data is still entirely intact; Just really, really hard to recover :)
unless you are the NSA that is
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