Wiping a Smartphone Still Leaves Data Behind 155
KindMind writes "To probably no one's surprise, wiping a smartphone by standard methods doesn't get all the data erased. From an article at Wired: 'Problem is, even if you do everything right, there can still be lots of personal data left behind. Simply restoring a phone to its factory settings won't completely clear it of data. Even if you use the built-in tools to wipe it, when you go to sell your phone on Craigslist you may be selling all sorts of things along with it that are far more valuable — your name, birth date, Social Security number and home address, for example. ... [On a wiped iPhone 3G, mobile forensics specialist Lee Reiber] found a large amount of deleted personal data that he recovered because it had not been overwritten. He was able to find hundreds of phone numbers from a contacts database. Worse, he found a list of nearly every Wi-Fi and cellular access point the phone had ever come across — 68,390 Wi-Fi points and 61,202 cell sites. (This was the same location data tracking that landed Apple in a privacy flap a few years ago, and caused it to change its collection methods.) Even if the phone had never connected to any of the Wi-Fi access points, iOS was still logging them, and Reiber was able to grab them and piece together a trail of where the phone had been turned on.'"
Social Security Number? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:68,000 wifi points?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with the assumption that these are not unique access points ... that's still an insane number. If we change the time-frame to 2 years, roughly the average lifespan between upgrades, he's up to 95 WiFi points per day.
If the wifi points are non-unique, 100 wifi points per day would be downright easy to achieve. I probably pass far more than that on the way to and from work each day on the bus.
Remember, it's not "how many networks have you connected to" but "how many have come in range of your antenna."
Unique points would be a lot harder to hit, but as someone else points out, you could probably rack up access points very quickly in a metropolitan area.
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
This was to prove that selling your OLD PHONE can raise security issues
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Email, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
In the 26 years I have had email and 12+ years I have had a smartphone I have never, EVER sent or received an email with my social security number in it.
This fear is a Capitol F in FUD.