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"You're in university… the prof cleans off the whiteboard, and if you look carefully, you can still see yesterday's lesson," Williams said. "There is really no way to wipe a phone. The data is still there but the phone loses the ability to actually find it."But third-party software still can.Williams, who's the CEO of Canadian Private Investigation Services, includes cell phone forensics as part of his services. Once, while investigating a case of internal corporate espionage, he was able to extract damning evidence from an encrypted smartphone that had been wiped. And the commercial tools at his disposal pale in comparison to those employed by organizations like the FBI and NSA, according to Williams."The only true way to get rid of that information is physical destruction," he added. "Burn it. Kill it with fire."Ann Cavoukian, executive director of Ryerson University's Privacy and Big Data Institute and the former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, also opts for destruction."It's just so very revealing in terms of the personal information it contains about you," she said of today's phones. "Privacy is highly contextual in terms of how important the information is relating to your activities. I would take a hammer to it."
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