iPhones are like elephants: they never forget

We can’t imagine parting with our iPhone just yet—not until the mythical 3G version comes out, anyway—but it seems that some of the refurbished iPhones that Apple is selling are making their way out to the public with a little extra something: data from their previous owners. A detective from the Oregon State Police was able to extract data from a refurbished iPhone. It appears that though you can wipe your iPhone from inside iTunes, it doesn’t do quite the thorough job that you might want.

So, if you are planning getting rid of your iPhone, Rich Mogull of TidBITS (and a Macworld contributor) has a suggestion about how to thoroughly clean your data off the iPhone, using nothing more than iTunes. Rich’s method essentially relies on overwriting the existing data by repeatedly syncing media files to the iPhone. It may not be quite as complete as some of the low-level formatting options available to other disks, but it’s probably better than just using the default that iTunes offers.

[via Gizmodo]

Category: News

Posted by Dan Moren on May 21 2008, 4:08 PM ET

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