iPhone 2.0 Shreds Your Data

by Eric March on June 25, 2008 at 9:11 pm

Not as a malicious act of vengeance, mind you, but it will do it if you tell it to.  You may recall the hubub surrounding the problems the iPhone has had deleting your personal information when you perform a complete restore on the device.  To be specific, it doesn’t, and that’s generated a great deal of concern from people who have sold their iPhones already as well as those who were thinking about doing so. There was a long and complicated workaround involving overwriting the device’s internal memory with repeated writes to the flash memory, but that’s long and irritating.

The good news is that the iPhone 2.0 firmware will now securely shred your data when you tell it to erase all content and settings.  The only noticeable difference between the current firmware and the forthcoming 2.0 when you tell it to reset is that it now warns in the confirmation box that the process will take about an hour — which sounds about right if it’s going to go through and zero out all of the storage memory.

Those of you who have not yet flipped your first-gen iPhone may want to wait ’til firmware 2.0 comes out before you reset and sell, just to make sure that all of your personal data is well and truly scrubbed from memory.

(via Apple Insider)

Posted in iPhone 2.0