Refurbished Apple iPhones may contain personal data from their previous owners that include email, images, contacts and more.

iPhone inbox

Performing a “restore” on the iPhone does not delete the data from the device. Even Apple’s refurbishing procedure apparently doesn’t erase all personal data from the iPhone. The latest report comes from a Oregon State Police Detective where a detective was able to retrieve some seriously sensitive personal data from a recently purchased refurbished iPhone using an iPhone forensics toolkit developed by Jonathan Zdziarski. As of this posting, there isn’t any memory formatting method available yet.