gHacks technology news » iphone privacy http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 The iPhone Home Button Is A Security Risk http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/12/the-iphone-home-button-is-a-security-risk/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/12/the-iphone-home-button-is-a-security-risk/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:49:11 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=6963 Now that makes for an interesting opening. When a user presses the iPhone’s home button it shrinks and disappears which is a nice looking effect. The problem is that the iPhone is taking a screenshot of the screen contents to create that effect. The screenshot can be of anything including emails, sms, notes, contacts or websites.

The screenshots get deleted after the application is closed and most users would think that this is the end of the story but there is a twist according to security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski who was able to recover deleted screenshots that would show him exactly what a user was doing at a given time.

This however is not the only privacy risk. Everything that gets at least temporarily stored on the could be recoverable including keyboard and Safari cache, deleted emails and pictures.

Someone does need physical access to the device to be able to recover data but it is possible. Will probably be only a matter of time before someone creates or edits a disk eraser so that it can wipe the unused space of the iPhone regularly.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/12/the-iphone-home-button-is-a-security-risk/feed/ 2 First iPhone App Pulled from Apple App Store http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/first-iphone-app-pulled-from-apple-app-store/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/first-iphone-app-pulled-from-apple-app-store/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:48:56 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5652 It was just a matter of time until the news would break that an application that has been offered on the Apple App Store was raising security or privacy concerns. Even Mozilla with their high quality controls let some bad apples slip through so it was just a matter of time.

The time has come apparently because the iPhone game Aurora Feint has been pulled from the Apple store due to privacy and security reasons. Here is why..

The developers of the game thought that it would be a cool feature to transfer his complete contact list to the game server to find out if any of his friends are playing the game itself. The contact list was transferred unencrypted (of course) and anyone with a little bit of knowledge could have gained those information easily.

aurora feint

The developers responded to that by claiming that they never stored the contact list on their servers and that they stopped saving (and erased) personal information that was recorded previously on July, 18th.

A real interesting aspect as the story unfolds is that the Apple SDK is apparently giving developers access to the user’s contact list. Apple should make sure that personal data never gets transferred unless the user authorizes the transfer before.

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