We’ve covered some of the screenshot shenanigans before, but heads up if you weren’t aware. PC Pro’s look into “for hire” and police-lead smartphone forensics is an eye-opening account of just how much data lives in your pocket.
GPS breadcrumbs, browser cookies, exif data, Skype logs; photos, videos and text messages long thought deleted. Emails nuked on the device but replicated on external servers. These are the fragments your phone may retain, and it has an increasingly long memory. See for yourself.
Still, no surprises here to many of you. And apart from passwords, credit card details, maybe work emails — or the odd drunken photograph — most of us don’t have too much to hide. Until you lose your phone that is. Thankfully, remote wiping works great…while your phone still has juice.
But back to those screenshots taken while rotating the iPhone. I wonder how long it stores those for…what happens when you’re running out of storage space? Maybe Simon Steggles, director of forensics at Disklabs, hits the nail on the head: “if you want to keep a secret, switch off your smartphone.” [PC Pro]