You can quibble over technical details, but at some point a judge will be asked if it fits the charge, and make a layman decision, not a programmer's one.
That's far from a mere technical detail, as it also means the person lacked any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence.
I recall there are some cases that centered on whether someone was aware of the existence of a browser cache and knew how to clear it. In that case the "evidence" really is on the local machine because that's what the cache is.
That would still be irrelevant if their intention for getting themselves to "lack any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence" is deemed by a judge to be malicious.
This, by the way is why the technical issues are important, relying solely on the lay person interpretation is dubious. A court that issued ruling on issues it doesn’t understand is inherently unjust.
Well, if they arranged so they are always, from the start, in that position, with the intent to leverage that "lack of control" to not produce evidence (i.e. with doing some law breaking in mind), that could still be considering incriminating...
And that, in the end, is a lay person's judgement to make...
If you are doing something to alter the device itself in any way (i.e. the bits anywhere on the device), it's a pretty straightforward path to the clink.
What isn't clear, though, is if the device was, for example, an "approved" device on some site/services and you logged into your accounts and removed access. Let's say for the sake of argument you had an encrypted chat app on your phone and that service has both web and mobile access. Your phone and laptop are approved devices. The police confiscate your phone. As soon as they release you, you log into your account from your laptop and remove the phone's access. The phone itself hasn't been changed. I wonder what would happen there.
Getting caught is less than half of the equation.
Not "Do you have a lock on your phone" or even "Do you have a lock on your phone which causes it to self-wipe after 5 incorrect password attempts" but "Did you, when you realised the police were on to you, deliberately wipe some data to stop you getting into trouble."
There seems to be a doubles standard in regards to the use of technical vs layman decisions. I've seen legal cases where the judge is making rulings on extremely technical points of law which are far outside the layman's understanding, but these only seem to happen when there are really expensive lawyers pushing for it. Have a public defender? Layman decisions, especially if they aren't in the defendants favor.
I wonder if anyone would have the ability to formalize this into actual research to see if there is any truth behind my intuition.
The police can just go to google or slack with a warrant to get the evidence. The physical equivalent would be going to the storage unit proprietor and cutting the lock.
IANAL but I would expect it to count as "hindering a police investigation", obstruction of justice, or something similar.
If only one or two such services were "timed out" then it's going to be harder to prove.