The astonishing amount of personal data police can extract from your smartphone

Your locations, even the deleted ones. Your chats. Your web browsing history. Your data files, even the deleted ones. And thousands more personal details buried on your mobile phone.The American Civil Liberties Union has published details from a Michigan search warrant of all of the information police were able to extract from one woman’s iPhone seized from her bedroom last September.“Before the age of smartphones, it was impossible for police to gather this much private information about a person’s communications, historical movements and private life during an arrest,” ACLU principal technologist Chris Soghoian wrote.“Our pockets and bags simply aren’t big enough to carry paper records revealing that much data. Today, five-year-old emails are just a few clicks away.”The findings have strong resonance in Ontario, where the Court of Appeal on Feb. 20 declared police can search any cellphone if it is not password-protected. Police can still search a cellphone that is password-protected, but they need a search warrant, the court said. In the U.S. case, police needed and won a search warrant, but American courts remain divided about whether it is necessary, Soghoian said.The data stripped from the Grand Rapids, Mich., iPhone was done by Cellebrite, a company devoted to decoding and extracting information from mobile phones. They sell a variety of portable data mining machines. The state-sanctioned hack of the Michigan phone, for example, revealed “Monica’s” 104 call logs, eight passwords, 422 SMS messages, six wireless networks and 10,149 data files of audio, pictures, text and videos, 378 of them deleted. “The delete button on the phone should really be called the ‘hide’ button, because the data is still there, you just can’t see it,” Rod McKemmish, the head of the IT forensics practice at corporate advisory firm PPB Advisory, said after recovering files that let to the resignation of the Australian parliamentary speaker, Peter Slipper. “In the forensic process we can bring it all back.”...more