iPhone owners looking to upgrade to the 3G iPhone, beware! When you sell your current iPhone on the secondary market (Craigslist, eBay) to help ease the pain on your wallet, you might want to make sure that all your personal data is erased from the device.
The problem with re-selling your iPhone to a private party is that all your personal information – email, images, contacts, etc. – remain on the device after an iTunes-based “Restore.” As a mini-computer in your pocket, the iPhone stores all your personal information in its on-board memory. Unfortunately, that means that a full-format is required to remove all data. The “Restore” option through iTunes doesn’t completely erase that sensitive personal data from the iPhone – the data remains intact on an unallocated portion of the iPhone’s NAND memory, although not readily visible.
Turns out, even Apple’s refurbishing procedure doesn’t erase all personal data from the iPhone.
The latest report comes from a Oregon State Police Detective. Using an iPhone forensics toolkit developed by iPhone developer extraordinaire Jonathan Zdziarski, the detective was able to retrieve some seriously sensitive personal data from a recently purchased refurbished iPhone. The screenshot you see here is from a refurbished iPhone from which the personal data (email inbox) was recovered.
So, what can we iPhone owners do to make sure that all our info is deleted before hocking it for the 3G iPhone? Well, there isn’t any memory formatting method available yet. But, Jonathan Zdziarski is aware of a low-level solution to wipe the NAND memory in the iPhone, so we could see an iPhone memory formatting utility launch in the near future.
Until a full-format utility becomes available for the iPhone, it would be prudent to manually delete all personal information (email accounts, images, contacts, etc.) from the iPhone before hitting the “Restore” button in iTunes. Oh, and if that email inbox screenshot looks familiar, let us know in the comments section.
[Via: iPhone Atlas]