With hordes of original iPhone owners looking to sell their used handsets on the secondary market in hopes of subsidizing their iPhone 3G purchase, the need for data security has become all that much more important. Thanks to Apple’s decision to lock down the iPhone’s filesystem and keep user information hidden from casual access, erasing personal data from the iPhone’s Flash memory has proven to be quite involved.
So, in an apparently response to the growing concern that a previous iPhone owner’s personal data could fall in to the hands of a motivated hacker, Apple has rolled out a data security feature in the new iPhone firmware revision.
iPhone 2.0 OS features an enhanced data-wiping capability built into its “Erase iPhone” feature. The current feature doesn’t allow for a complete memory wipe of user data, but screenshots of the iPhone 2.0 OS’s data-wipe feature shows that a more complete solution has been developed to wipe all traces of user data from the iPhone’s memory.
[Via: Engadget Mobile]