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I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Your iPhone is SPYING on you!

A few people have posted this today: iPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do (via yum9me). It starts with this incredibly misleading paragraph:

If you’ve got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover, according to a renowned iPhone hacker who exposed the security flaw in a webcast Thursday.

…before explaining that what it’s really doing is saving a cached image of the screen when you press the Home button to generate the zooming animation, and that image is deleted after it’s done. And then, since that data existed at one time but was deleted, data-forensics people can potentially extract it given enough money, time, and effort after taking your iPhone apart.

All computers store everything you do in memory. They need to. That’s how they create, edit, process, and store your data. And often, the contents of memory are written to disk for various practical reasons, then deleted. You can hack data out of unencrypted swapfiles the same way. This could have been said about every computing device.

Does the author of this article, Brian X. Chen, work on McCain’s TV commercials?