Intellectual
Delete doesn't mean gone
A short read
What "delete" actually does
Tap delete and the file disappears at once. The screen looks clean, so it feels finished. But hiding a file is not the same as erasing it. The data can still be sitting right there.
Myth or fact?I deleted it, so it's gone.Tap to reveal
It feels true because the file vanishes the second you tap delete. But delete usually just removes the pointer to the file. The real data stays on the drive until something new writes over it. And online, copies and backups may already exist.
Sources
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
- NIST Special Publication 800-88 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization)
- Consumer Reports
- UC Berkeley Information Security Office
- Microsoft Sysinternals (SDelete)
- The Conversation
- EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Article 17)
- Canada PIPEDA
- IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals)