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Comment by oAlbe | Hacker News Reader

> Since most of our private data is stored in the cloud — and not on individual devices — you could also reset your phone to its factory settings [...] Then if you’re asked to hand it over, there won’t be any personal data on your phone

This makes me wonder: is it true? Is the data truly unrecoverable if you factory-reset your phone? I doubt so. But maybe there's some special tool to truly wipe a device (say like the equivalent of DBAN)

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At least on an iPhone, erased is erased. On android some versions use full disk encryption but many do not, it's a guess.

It's not a "guess". The last Android release that lacked support for block-device-level encryption was KitKat, which shipped in 2013. Any device being advertised with the "Android" trademark (to be fair: AOSP-based clone OSes like Amazon's have been slower to evolve) over the last two years has that support.

Please don't hijack an important security discussion to engage in meaningless platform flamage. Users with Android phones have this available and they should enable it, not be told that they need to "guess".

I have some questions actually. Is it something you need to enable on Android? I seem to understand from the comment above yours that iOS has this enabled by default. If so, how do you actually enable it?

Settings -> Security -> Encrypt Phone

Yes, it's impossible to disable the disk encryption on iOS. If you don't set a passcode, the disk is still encrypted (but only with a per device key), this prevents recovery of data after an erase.

I frequently see people with KitKat devices. Just because they aren't being sold by big parties now doesn't mean people don't have them, I can't make a global statement about Android devices the same I can about iOS ones.

Android still lacks behind in regards of disk encryption. See this in-depth article that was posted on HN a while ago: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/11/24/android-...

Also the parent post was talking about usage, not availability of encryption. So while recent Android versions most certainly offer encryption, it might not be enabled. iOS encrypted by default, as it should be.

On most recent phones, the system is encrypted by default and a factory reset erases the keys, which does make it unrecoverable (unless the key is elsewhere, which I haven't heard of).

Definitely unrecoverable. The whole point of the feature is to make it impossible to recover the data once the key is erased, so you can be sure they're not storing a backup anywhere as that would defeat the point.

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