this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Soooo the data on your phone isn't gone because you delete or reset the phone. You literally need to write a blob of zeros or random numbers to fill the space again.
And even that is questionable as there are areas of the storage you are not allowed to write too -- and those areas could contain identifiable data like contacts, SMS, etc...
Just a FYI
Not quite true for phones or anything with SSDs with trim enabled - in most scenarios the data is unrecoverable except for tiny fragments or if you go through some huge effort of pulling the flash chips out and also are lucky, true enough for memory cards or spinning disks though.
On Android for example, trim only runs every 24h, if the battery is above a certain charge level, and maybe some.other conditions. So it's not entirely bulletproof either. Recent things can be recovered.
Definitely not bulletproof - but unless they're after you specifically, and this is the only avenue remaining, the cost of attempting recovery and the risk of alerting you that they are in fact after you, when in the vast majority of circumstances it would yield very little, one would think there'd be cheaper ways to get your data directly from cloud providers or through other, more traditional methods.
Then again I could be naive about this.
This is not true. As soon as the key is wiped from the TPM-like thingy, any data left on the flash is unrecoverable.