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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

Of course the fault lies with the person who posted the images online. That person also violated state and federal laws. There is no doubt about that.

However, most people wouldn't knowingly leave nude images of their spouse on the car's back seat when getting the car serviced. In many ways this is similar.

Edit: For people who think I'm blaming the victim, I am not. I thought that was clear, since I blamed the thief/poster of the photos! This is in many ways similar to leaving photos in a car. That is not to say that the person with the phone is at fault, but that this also happens in many other cases. If this happened to me (which it has), I'd do something else instead of sending my phone for repair by an unknown person.

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I don't know how broken the phone was, but it's possible for a phone to be so damaged that you can't wipe it's contents prior to sending it in for service.

I love car analogies (who doesn't), I think this is more like your car being on fire and asking a firefighter to put it out, while hoping they won't find and share any documents they find in the back seat.

So what do you do when your car is on fire but there's also nude photos in the back seat? Asking genuinely, don't know what would be the best thing to do...

Wait to call the fire department until you're sure the photos have burned.

(No, I'm not serious; this is terrible advice!)

Indeed, when my Pixel 1 abruptly failed it would not turn on at all. Not merely briefly, not a boot loop, it was truly a brick and there was no way to alter what was on it. I thought it was unfortunate that it happened a mere few months past the end of warranty, but at least that way I didn't send it back to Google. Instead, a local school got it for the students to disassemble in a technology course.

Now, I don't store nudes on my phone. That said, it was recently suggested to me, here on HN, to use a scanner app in lieu of a flatbed scanner for all my scanning needs (primarily documents around tax time). Not so sure that's a good idea versus this.

The post said the phone wouldn't turn on, so how were they supposed to clean it up before sending it out?

Granted, this may be the best reason I've heard yet for why removing the option to have an SD card is bad...

> The post said the phone wouldn't turn on, so how were they supposed to clean it up before sending it out?

I think you are asking the wrong question. It's more useful to ask how to initially safeguard the pictures instead of how to remove them after something broke. If the pictures were encrypted, then it doesn't matter who has possession of the phone.

The phone was broken in a way they couldn't wipe it according to the post. Bad assumptions here.

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