You couldn’t make it up.
My old iPhone made its way as a warranty replacement for a phone bought from www.mob.co.nz. They replaced Sandy’s partner’s phone – she’s called Brenda – with my old iPhone. The problem is that I trusted that the new much-vaunted iPhone 2.0 clean and wipe feature would get rid of all the personal data on my iPhone. A false sense of security, as became apparent to me yesterday evening.
I was posting onTwinkle, the admittedly camp name for a Twitter client on the iPhone (seriously, you couldn’t make this story up if you tried) last nght. I paused to have a shave, log back in and I see my name by a post saying:
“This is Sarb’s alter-ego. Messages from another planet”
The colour drained out of my cheeks. I looked around. The location information on the post said it was posted from 2kms away from me. Now my house is further away than that, so no, no-one had hacked into my laptop either. I wondered what it was, and I figured it must have been my old iPhone. I went to sleep, more than a little concerned.
Turns out that it looks like Brenda got the iPhone as a warranty replacement from mob.co.nz. Although the guy from mob.co.nz may have replaced the firmware, it did not delete the personal data I still had on the phone. What are you playing at Apple? So, I guess Brenda was playing around with the phone and saw that Twinkle still had my twitter data in it, linked to my Tapulous account (the makers of Twitter). I delinked that iPhone from that Tapulous account at around midday today, but I think it is a HUGE issue that the personal data on a ‘wiped’ iPhone can still authenticate an app on the iPhone. Be warned. I guess Brenda also knows a bit more about her warranty replacement iPhone now too.
If this makes it to Apple, it would be nice to hear from you and let me know what you’re going to do about it. www.metime.org.uk
Although Alan, another twitterer reckons it could possibly be more of a Tapulous issue because of the way the use the iPhone ID to authenticate. Still, now that Twinkle is an official app, you’d think Apple would want to shut down that particular trapdoor to personal data.
So there you go. One iPhone, and application called Twinkle, a tech-savvy socially-connected lesbian couple in Wellington and me. This isn’t really what I thought was going to happem when i signed up for this particular social networking client, but hey. Life is interesting.
