Refurbished iPhones Said to Contain Previous Owners Personal Information

by Jody Mitoma on May 22, 2008 at 12:35 pm

According to iPhone/iPod Touch hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, refurbished iPhone’s may contain the personal data of previous owners of the device.

“A verified detective from the Oregon State Police notified me this afternoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased contained recoverable personal data including email, personal photos, and even financial information which he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit. The photos he sent me included the individual’s name, which I’ve blurred out myself, but if you’ve ever had to return a defective iPhone, you might recognize this inbox. The more sensitive information hasn’t been posted here for obvious reasons.”

Performing a “Restore” will not get rid of this personal information, thus, the only way to get rid of this personal information is to actually SSH (use FTP software) and “hack” into your device, getting rid of the information manually.

iPhone Atlas states:

At left is actual stored data from a refurbished iPhone: a screenshot that the iPhone took itself of the user’s inbox when its user pressed the ‘Home’ button. Application snapshots are taken every time a program goes into the background to generate the zoom effects built into the device.

There currently exits no viable, publicly available method for erasing personal data on the iPhone. Erasing your content and settings has no effect on whether a subsequent owner can recover personal information. According to Zdziarski “there are only a couple low-level methods to format the NAND and I’m not sharing at the moment.”

This means that Apple Inc. has been reselling their products, with the personal information of those who’ve had previous ownership of said device. Tsk tsk, Apple. Not cool, man.

(Source: iPhone Atlas)

One Response to “Refurbished iPhones Said to Contain Previous Owners Personal Information”

Eric March said:

May 22nd, 2008 at 6:40 pm

Engadget posted a long-winded solution to this for anyone who wants to flip their iPhone and make sure there’s no personal data on it. It’s the equivalent of basically overwriting deleted data manually, so it ain’t fun, but supposedly it works.