hi dear
We briefly mentioned using junk data to overwrite the iPhone's flash as a
last-ditch method of securely clearing off your user data yesterday,
and although we were half-joking, that's more or less your only option
until Apple provides a
proper
secure erase feature. Security researcher Rich Mogull has helpfully
laid out the steps for you, and they're basically what you'd expect:
restore your iPhone, don't sync any personal data to it, and then
manually transfer three different playlists large enough to fill the
flash. Essentially you're doing a manual three-pass overwrite, which is
pretty much exactly the long and tedious process it sounds like -- but
we wouldn't dream of selling or giving away our iPhones (or any other
phone with personal data on it) without struggling through it.
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