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Photos on Smartphones Can Never Be Removed

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  1. #1

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    Photos on Smartphones Can Never Be Removed

    I listened to an interesting radio programme about revenge porn ('Assignment' on BBC World Service). Someone said that photos on smartphones can never be removed. Even if they have been deleted the record remains and they can be recovered. It sounds creepy. Do the manufacturers do this on purpose or is it an unavoidable part of the design? Are all computers like this?

    He said the only thing to do is to soak the SIM card in salt water (why salt water?) and then burn it.


  2. #2

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    May be its not the sim card..may be the memory card..what about internal storage? Soak the whole phone in salt water and burn?

    Sent from my GT-N7105 using GeoClicks mobile app


  3. #3

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    Its still horsecrap.
    The memory on any phone is finite. If you delete something, the memory is freedup to be used by some other process (or video or picture). There is no way for a phone to keep your photos/videos forever.


  4. #4

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    Quote Originally Posted by R.O.:
    Someone said that photos on smartphones can never be removed. Even if they have been deleted the record remains and they can be recovered.
    It's true that just deleting the photo doesn't guarantee that it's gone. Lots of utilities out there to recover deleted photos.

    The proper way to wipe data is to overwrite it, but that's probably beyond the ability of the average user.

  5. #5

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    Quote Originally Posted by answerer:
    It's true that just deleting the photo doesn't guarantee that it's gone. Lots of utilities out there to recover deleted photos.

    The proper way to wipe data is to overwrite it, but that's probably beyond the ability of the average user.
    have you ever format a memory card ,so easy, nothing is left, absolute zero

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by imparanoic:
    have you ever format a memory card ,so easy, nothing is left, absolute zero
    That, in general, is not true.

    Memory cards use a filesystem which involves the actual image data being stored separately from the directory data. When you delete a file, it's just marked as deleted in the directory, or maybe removed from the directory totally - but the image is still on the card. When you format a card, it normally just deletes the directory completely and replaces it with a blank one, but depending on exactly how you format it, the image data can still be there.

    A decent recovery package, particularly one of the programs designed to recover images, can search the whole card to find things that look like images, and recover them. It's not perfect, but it's definitely possible. What you need to do is a secure format, an overwrite - it's got different names, but what it means in the end is deleting - overwriting - the entire card, not just the directory listings...
    Morrison likes this.

  7. #7

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    Also consider that with flash memory in general nowadays, including SSDs, just overwriting a file won't cut it.

    If you overwrite a certain file the controller doesn't write in the exact same physical locations (blocks, sectors, cells, whatever you call the location on the memory chip).

    This is for various reason, such as NAND flash (ie. in SSDs) can only reliable write to empty cells without any data (so would have to do a slow erase operation first), and also to ensure the life-time of the chip is extended by not writing the same location again and again but evenly spread write operations on all cells throughout the lifetime...

    In other words: if you have a nude pic of your girlfriend and the file is on cells 1001, 1002 and 1003, the overwrite process leaves 1001, 1002 and 1003 untouched and marks it for garbage collection later. It may write to 2001, 2002 and 2003 instead. If you come in now with some recovery/forensic tool you can recover the nude pic, although you think it has been overwritten. Only way to really overwrite is to also overwrite the free space on the disk/memory.

    Edit: Since SD cards, USB sticks etc all use NAND flash memory, it also applies to these. There are tools that let you shred (overwrite) files and empty space. Not sure if you can get some tools specialized for flash memory nowadays, but I assume you can.

    Last edited by 100LL; 15-12-2013 at 06:36 AM.

  8. #8

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    This may be useful, easy to use and free and provides from 3 to 35 overwrite for almost unrecoverable deleting.

    http://eraser.heidi.ie


  9. #9

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    I have just used an axe


  10. #10

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    In doubt, burn the whole damn thing.


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