Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Go Back in iPhone Water

As I was making my daily rounds of the eDiscovery Blogs, I came across a posting on the Orcatec Blog that pointed to another Blog posting about problems with the iPhone. I really have a lot of respect for the team at Orcatec and also find that they highlight some very important aspect of eDiscovery on their Blog.   Once again, they have uncovered a topic and an issue that has been overlooked by most of us. So, here it is:

The Wired Gadget Lab blog yesterday had a post saying that the iPhone takes a screen shot of practically every action you perform.  It stores these screen shots to support its visual effects and supposedly deletes them after the application is closed.  But, like a lot of computer data, even though it is deleted, that does not mean that it cannot be retrieved.  Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski is quoted in the post as saying that this information can be used to nab criminals.  It could well also play a role in civil litigation.

Zdziarski also demonstrated how to bypass the security of the iPhone.  This could also be valuable information for forensics experts and attorneys.  He has a book coming out on iPhone hacking.
Among the other concerns in modern eDiscovery, it is clear that the number of places that responsive evidence could be stored is also increasing.  More and more business and personal “artifacts” contain memory that may be holding sensitive information.  On the opposite side, all of this stored information, while convenient, and, in the case of the iPhone, esthetically pleasing, also raises serious privacy concerns.  As the saying goes, don’t do anything on your iPhone that you would not want to appear on the front page of the New York Times.